A view of North America on April 29, 2016, from NASA’s DSCOVR:EPIC satellite. Image credit: NASA
Oh, how the mighty have fallen. The intense El Niño we saw this winter captured the imaginations of headline writers around the world for more than a year, earning the outlandish moniker “Godzilla El Niño” to convey to an entertainment-thirsty public just how unusually strong the phenomenon had gotten. The event will soon be a memory as it’s quickly fading away, likely to be replaced by the opposite anomaly—a La Niña—in the coming months.
The U.S. Climate Prediction Center released its monthly report on May 12 signaling that El Niño’s end is nigh and La Niña won’t be far behind. Since we call this unusually warm water “the little boy” in Spanish (named in honor of the baby Jesus, as it was discovered around Christmas), we call unusually cold water in this part of the Pacific Ocean “the little girl,” or La Niña.
An El Niño is simply the presence of warmer-than-normal water in the eastern Pacific Ocean. It’s not a storm that crashes ashore or something that’s out for blood. Scientists officially classify the event an El Niño when the surface waters of the eastern Pacific Ocean around the equator grow abnormally warm for a long period of time, clocking in at 0.5°C above average for seven straight months.
Climate models show a swift transition from El Niño to a La Niña by this summer. Image credit: Climate Prediction Center
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