Free Severity Of El NIño Is Affected By Wind Bursts Essay Sample

El Niño is a weather phenomenon, which brings drought over its affected areas. There were many studies and researches concerning the significance of El Niño as to how it affects not only the climate, but the human populations in particular. It is essential that extensive studies must be done as it is important in many aspects of people’s lives, such as developing a particular plan to adapt sudden change in climate. In this analysis, we discussed the main points highlighted in the article and provided some insights as to how it can be used as one of the many sources of information to help readers better understand this weather phenomenon.
Recently, a new research done by the University of Maryland was published on 13th of April 2015, showing the significance of wind bursts when it comes to the formation of El Niño severity. Basically, it is not only the weather researchers and analysts who must be concerned about this news as this weather event may affect the people’s health as well as the agricultural crops that affects the economy. Based on the article, “the journal, Nature Geoscience finds that prolonged wind bursts originating in the western Pacific can have a strong effect on whether an El Niño event will occur and how severe it is likely to be” (University of Maryland, 2015, para. 2). The wind bursts show that it is one of the main factors that influences which type of El Niño might occur. In that sense, the research result may serve as an additional guide for weather forecast. Providing an accurate weather, especially during this type of event is important so as to provide an early warning for those people who might get affected with El Niño.
Furthermore, the article did not put El Niño under any category as far as the climate and the weather are concerned. They said that the wind bursts coming from the western Pacific are intraseasonal, which means they are neither weather, nor a climate, but they fall in between (University of Maryland, 2015). The categorization was identified by Raghu Murtugudde, who is a professor in the University of Maryland’s Oceanic Science and was part of the research team. He also added that their study shows sufficient evidence in relation to the wind bursts’ effect. That is why, it would be better to understand such effects in order to provide a better prediction of El Niño occurrence. Relatively, today’s predictions are generally focused on El Niño and its various effects, but extensive analysis of its explanatory causes is not normally part of the overall forecast.
The article also provided the researchers’ method of analogy, which said that a five-decade collaborated temperature of the tropical Pacific’s surface was used. The gathered data was integrated with the recoded wind bursts and found out some differences between today’s El Niño occurrence and the one that happened during the mid-1990s. These types of analysis and data comparison are not often a practice in weather forecasting as El Niño is not part of the regular weather season. In which case, those gathered pieces of information can now be used in providing more accurate and more informative weather forecasting, which will include the possibility of El Niño event using the westerly wind bursts data. Therefore, necessary plans can be made by different local government units to prevent possible further damage caused by this event.
It was noted in the article that the major difference between the current El Niño and the one happened in mid-1990s is the tough westerly winds that were extended towards the center of the equatorial Pacific, which is not visible in 2014-2015 El Niño event (University of Maryland, 2015). Thus, the two important elements to generate an enormous El Niño are “the development of strong westerly winds in the central equatorial Pacific in association with the warming to its east” (University of Maryland, 2015, par. 5).
During the process of their study, the research team found that the inclusion of the strong westerly winds of the ocean-atmosphere combined model may produce three different types of El Niño instead of a type without using the wind bursts output data. Based on the published study, the patterns of warm weather are severely strong events that cause warm in the areas not far from the coast of South America, a group of minor warm events that are centered not far from the dateline, and a moderate warming effect within the eastern Pacific (University of Maryland, 2015). On the other hand, severe El Niño occurrences show a strong westerly wind that grows even stronger, which also extended towards the eastern part of the dateline.
The results of gathering data based on how strong the wind bursts will be are very important findings in order to predict the severity of warm events on each specific location as it also affects the dynamics of the ocean using Kelvin waves, which generate the warming of the eastern Pacific surface. Murtugudde is concerned about the results of this study as he claims that these are essential for researchers of climate modeling.
It was emphasized that the wind bursts from the west have major impacts on the severity and diversity of potential El Niño occurrence to which the weather forecasting must also be extended to a four-week basis so as to obtain the variability of westerly wind bursts or WWB. On a broader perspective, it is not just a matter of attaining a more accurate weather forecast, but to provide more detailed information to the people as the El Niño phenomenon is a serious event that everyone must be aware of.
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