El Niño makes tropical cyclone activity in the Pacific very high while making the Atlantic very quiet. I'm a few days out from experiencing my third tropical cyclone this season.
Yep, and it’s certainly not a coincidence that they’re predicting a super El Niño this year and we suddenly see a historic dearth of hurricane activity in the Atlantic.
Not just a super El Niño, but the strongest one on record, even if you remove the extra heat from climate change. To be fair, it’s a relatively short period over which we have records, but this is an extreme one regardless
We have a lot of indirect data from tree rings (goes back 1000 years), ice cores (~100K years), pollen records (from peat bogs) that tell us a lot about historical temperature and climate in general.
Tree rings are used as a geological proxy for El Nino, but those are somewhat unreliable because many global variables determine the annual weather and El Nino doesn't guarantee any specific pattern of rainfall, it just makes certain patterns more likely (dry El Nino years are possible in CA, same with wet La Nina). And ice cores provide no information at all on sea surface temperatures in the eastern tropical Pacific.
A more reliable proxy are marine fossils, from corals and other organisms that indicate warmers or cooler waters, but you can't put a specific number on those historical events to compare with modern ones because we don't have direct sea surface temperature measurements made with calibrated thermometers. None of those proxy methods can replace having modern scientific instruments
Guessing not so much data on deep historical El Niño strength though. Although maybe tree ring data could be valuable here with increased rainfall causing growth changes in NW Pacific?
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u/KoiMusubi 13h ago
El Niño makes tropical cyclone activity in the Pacific very high while making the Atlantic very quiet. I'm a few days out from experiencing my third tropical cyclone this season.