Climatologist says incoming El Niño winter could be wettest on record in California
The looming El Niño could bring one of the wettest winters on record to California, according to renowned climatologist Daniel Swain.
In a social media post shared Thursday, Swain, a climate scientist with the California Institute for Water Resources, shared an update from the European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts, the gold standard for weather forecasting, which predicts a "genuinely extraordinary to extreme" El Niño that could impact California for months.
Swain says that the ECMWF prediction indicates 70% to 100% odds of above-average winter precipitation in the Golden State, and 70% to 100% odds of the coming winter, from December to February, being among the top 20% of wettest California winters ever recorded.
While the news of an El Niño isn't exactly surprising for Californians, it's concerning for many residents living along the Southern California coast, particularly after the latest round of King Tides.
"I would be concerned about it just because if that's what's happening now, El Niño obviously has more of a climatic effect," said Robert Merrell, a Long Beach resident.
He said that the recent King Tides have happened more frequently in the last year than in the past, according to his neighbors. Last week, the tides brought dangerous surf conditions to much of the coastline and damaged some of the protective measures put in place by cities.
"This year, we've seen more times that they've had to build the berms up; the water comes up through the alleyways and in the houses here," Merrell said.
The Associated Press says that an El Niño is a natural temporary warming that occurs in the Pacific Ocean. It typically drives up the global average temperature and warps weather across the planet. After an extraordinarily hot summer, meteorologists believe that the it will also lead to a warmer and much rainier winter that could lead to flooding.
While the southern portion of the U.S. will be stormier, the weather phenomenon typically causes drier conditions in middle America and a warmer than normal winter in the north, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, which predicted that the El Niño could be so intense that it would "rank among the largest El Niño events in the historical record going back to 1950."
