Episode 43: El Niño and La Niña

In this episode of the podcast, I have explained “El Niño and La Niña.”

Additional Info:
El Nino means Little Boy, or Christ Child in Spanish. South American fishermen first noticed periods of unusually warm water in the Pacific Ocean in the 1600s. The full name they used was El Nino de Navidad, because El Nino typically peaks around December. El Niño episodes feature an equatorwardshifted, stronger-than-normal jet stream and wetter-than-average conditions across the southern part of the United States, and less storminess and milder-than-average conditions across the North.
La Nina means Little Girl in Spanish. La Nina is also sometimes called El Viejo, anti-El Nino, or simply "a cold event." La Nina has the opposite effect of El Nino. During La Nina events, trade winds are even stronger than usual, pushing more warm water toward Asia. Off the west coast of the Americas, upwelling increases, bringing cold, nutrient-rich water to the surface.
During La Nina, waters off the Pacific coast are colder and contain more nutrients than usual. This environment supports more marine life and attracts more cold-water species, like squid and salmon, to places like the California coast. El Nino also has a strong effect on marine life off the Pacific coast. During normal conditions, upwelling brings water from the depths to the surface; this water is cold and nutrient rich. During El Nino, upwelling weakens or stops altogether. Without the nutrients from the deep, there are fewer phytoplankton off the coast. This affects fish that eat phytoplankton and, in turn, affects everything that eats fish. The warmer waters can also bring tropical species, like yellowtail and albacore tuna, into areas that are normally too cold. The resulting impacts of El Niño are felt worldwide including widespread droughts, floods, and decimated fisheries. South American equatorial regions are hit especially hard due to decreased upwelling. This causes the marine food web to collapse from lack of nutrients, resulting in massive disruptions to crucial ecosystems off Peru. The strongest signal of ENSO impacts is in the areas closest to the equatorial Pacific, El Niño and La Niña are such powerful forces that they can shift seasonal temperature and precipitation patterns around the globe. These shifts, known as teleconnections, occur via the effects of tropical sea-surface temperatures on the upper atmosphere.  Under non-El Nin˜ o conditions, a pool of warm water is usually located in the western equatorial Pacific. It provides moisture to the atmosphere through evaporative processes which lead to the formation of convective activity and rain-producing cloud systems in that region.

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