El Nino is here and scientists fear it’ll be big, bad and costly with heat, floods, droughts, fires. Let’s revisit this in a year to confirm all the scientists claims
Tag Archives: El Nino
La Nina Is fading As El Nino appears
Climate changes with the golf season.
Looking ahead, the latest data shows most of California, especially the southern part, trending toward drier and warmer weather than normal through April. After a very dry January, this week did welcome some rain, however.
Once La Nina fades out, it’s probably only a matter of time before the opposite weather phenomenon of El Nino develops. Already, there’s an up to 60% chance that El Nino will form later this summer, according to the Climate Prediction Center’s latest forecast. Although this general guideline may be outdated, El Nino tends to bring wetter winter conditions to California.
Are You Ready To Fight Godzilla El Nino?
Since 1951, there have been 26 El Niño events. Of those, 11 have been weak, 7 moderate, 5 strong and 3 very strong. Overall during all of them, rainfall in Southern California averaged 126% of normal. In the Bay Area it was 109% of normal.
During two of the three very strong El Niños, the winters of 1982-83 and 1997-98 were among the wettest in recorded California history, with massive Sierra Nevada snowpacks and major flooding.
The third, in 2015-16, was something of a bust. Hyped as a “Godzilla El Niño,” that event did see big winter storms, but they ended up hitting Oregon and Washington, dashing hopes of breaking a California drought, which didn’t end until big storms finally arrived in 2017.
Newcomer Acheman’s Seal Posse Reports Drop In Seals
Wonder why.
According to a population census taken on Nov. 25 by husband and wife Thom and Kim Akeman, volunteers with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Association’s shoreline program Bay Net, the Pacific Grove Harbor seal population has declined by one-third. Numbers have plunged from about 700 individuals, based on preliminary counts taken by Monterey Bay Aquarium researcher Teri Nicholson in the 1990s, to fewer than 500 in the last couple of years, the Akemans reported. Uncharacteristically warm waters, which depleted the marine environment of oxygen and food, are to blame, they added.
El Nino In A Match Against Substainable Pacific Grove
Can’t tell which is fake?
Just as big waves wash away carefully constructed sand castles, El Niño threatens to transform Monterey County beaches and coastlines.
Every winter rainy season brings storms and heavy surf that erode shores and wash away sand, which waves return to the coast in summer. But El Niño generates extra rain and higher sea levels, which increases the erosion during intense and windy storms, affecting coastal bluffs and beaches around Carmel, Pacific Grove, Pebble Beach and Monterey.
Residents and city officials are not taking any chances. For example, in Pacific Grove, residents are considering whether to buttress the shoreline by building seawalls to protect property or retreat to higher ground further inland and protect the natural shoreline.
“I believe this is a very important question,” said Anthony Ciani, an architect and member of Sustainable Pacific Grove. A small survey conducted by the organization found that people currently seem to favor retreating, he said.