Research shows that El Niño creates conditions for a certain type of hurricane – and offers clues as to how climate change can affect the severity of hurricanes.
Pretty, but also pretty nasty.
Willem van Aken/CSIRO/Wikimedia Commons
With El Niño ramping up, Australia is in for a long, hot, dry summer - perfect conditions for blue-green algae. And that innocuous-looking pond scum can pack a toxic punch if you’re not careful.
Photosynthesis is crucial to the ability of plants to convert sunlight into energy.
N i c o l a/Flickr
Willem Landman, Council for Scientific and Industrial Research
The upcoming El Niño event may see an even bigger drop in the water level of Lake Kariba. This will have terrible consequences for the people using the river.
When the Indian Ocean combines with El Niño dry conditions come to Australia.
Drought images from www.shutterstock.com
High temperatures make droughts worse, right? Wrong: it’s the other way around. Ahead of an El Niño summer that looks set to bring drought to much of Australia, here’s a quick primer on how they form.
El Nino brings drought to Indonesia, and warmer weather to almost the entire globe.
Reuters/Romeo Ranoco
El Niño has a hugely pervasive effect on global temperatures - for every degree the tropical Pacific warms, land temperatures warm by 1.5 degrees. How? Because the tropical ocean is a very good heater.
This summer’s El Niño is likely to bring more frequent heatwaves to a large swathe of Australia’s north and east.
Reuters/Mick Tsikas
The link between El Niño and heatwaves is complicated. But what we can say is that this summer’s strong El Niño conditions are likely to bring more heatwaves to much of Australia’s north and east.
Faith Kearns, University of California, Division of Agriculture and Natural Resources e Doug Parker, University of California, Division of Agriculture and Natural Resources
El Niño is expected to bring heavy rains to drought-stricken California, but more rain alone won’t solve the West’s water crisis.
Children from a village in Papua New Guinea’s Western Highlands Province stand in one of countless sweet potato gardens destroyed by frost across the country, August 2015.
Kud Sitango
Papua New Guinea is now facing a drought and frosts that look set to be worse than 1997, when hundreds of people died. So how can memories of 1997 save lives over the next few months?
People in the Philippines have been warned to brace for wet and wild weather, as this year’s El Nino shapes up to be the strongest since 1998.
EPA/RITCHIE B. TONGO/AAP
The seesaw between El Niño and La Niña is set to get stronger with global warming. Signs are that this year and next will deliver a big swing from one to the other, prompting fires and floods across the world.
The large 1982 El Niño contributed to the Ash Wednesday bushfires that killed 75 people in south east Australia.
Sydney Oats/Wikimedia
This weekend is predicted to be the coldest of the year in Australia. But it has otherwise been a slow start to the snow season, and my research shows that this is a sign of things to come.
Thick smoke blankets the Indonesian peatlands.
Azwar / EPA