What happens during El Nino Southern Oscillation?
El Niño–Southern Oscillation (ENSO) is an irregular periodic variation in winds and sea surface temperatures over the tropical eastern Pacific Ocean, affecting the climate of much of the tropics and subtropics. The warming phase of the sea temperature is known as El Niño and the cooling phase as La Niña.
What events are associated with El Niño?
Major El Niño events—such as 1972-73, 1982-83, 1997-98, and 2015-16—have provoked some of the great floods, droughts, forest fires, and coral bleaching events of the past half-century. El Niño years tend to be warmer than other years.
What are 2 effects of El Niño?
Severe drought and associated food insecurity, flooding, rains, and temperature rises due to El Niño are causing a wide range of health problems, including disease outbreaks, malnutrition, heat stress and respiratory diseases.
What kind of events disruptions occur during an El Niño event and a La Niña event?
El Niño and La Niña can make extreme weather events more likely in certain regions, including droughts, floods and storms.
What causes El Niño Southern Oscillation?
Although the exact initiating causes of an ENSO warm or cool event are not fully understood, the two components of ENSO – sea surface temperature and atmospheric pressure are strongly related. During an El Niño event, the easterly trade winds converging across the equatorial Pacific weaken.
What is El Nino Southern Oscillation Class 9?
Southern Oscillation (ENSO) is an irregularly periodic variation in winds and sea surface temperatures over the tropical eastern Pacific Ocean, affecting climate of much of the tropics and subtropics. The warming phase of the sea temperature is known as El Nino and the cooling phase as La Nina.
Why El Nino happens?
El Niño occurs when warm water builds up along the equator in the eastern Pacific. The warm ocean surface warms the atmosphere, which allows moisture-rich air to rise and develop into rainstorms.
What is El Niño event?
El Niño is a climate pattern that describes the unusual warming of surface waters in the eastern equatorial Pacific Ocean. El Niño events occur irregularly at two- to seven-year intervals. However, El Niño is not a regular cycle, or predictable in the sense that ocean tides are.
What part of the world is affected by El Niño?
Southern Africa, including Zimbabwe, Botswana, Namibia, Angola, South Africa, Lesotho, Swaziland, and the southern half of Mozambique, tends to see a drier December–February during an El Niño. Areas of this region, especially South Africa, were already very dry, after a failed monsoon last year.
What causes El Niño and La Niña phenomena?
Why do El Niño and La Niña occur? El Niño and La Niña result from interaction between the surface of the ocean and the atmosphere in the tropical Pacific. Changes in the ocean impact the atmosphere and climate patterns around the globe. In turn, changes in the atmosphere impact the ocean temperatures and currents.
What is the relationship between La Niña and El Niño?
Little boy and little girl, El Niño and La Niña, are the ocean’s children. They’re part of the overall ENSO cycle, the El Niño-Southern Oscillation cycle. The El Niño part of the cycle is the unusual warming of the eastern Pacific Ocean and La Niña is the opposite – the unusual cooling of this part of the Pacific.