The United Nation’s (UN) World Meteorological Organisation says there is a 75-80 percent chance that El Nino will be a “weak event” in the next couple of months.
Unfortunately this means El Nino’s role as a natural buffer to the formation of huge storms will also be weakened.
As a result, the natural weather phenomenon will lead to both serious droughts and serious flooding in early 2019 as climate patterns are thrown into chaos.
El Nino is responsible for warming ocean temperatures, which in turn leads to fewer major storms as it is more difficult for them to form over warmer seas.
However, with a weak El Nino predicted major weather systems will take advantage of the cooler ocean and could devastate the globe.
Maxx Dilley, director of the WMO’s Climate Prediction and Adaptation branch, said: “The forecast El Niño is not expected to be as powerful as the event in 2015-2016, which was linked with droughts, flooding and coral bleaching in different parts of the world.
“Even so, it can still significantly affect rainfall and temperature patterns in many regions, with important consequences to agricultural and food security sectors, and for management of water resources and public health, and it may combine with long-term climate change to boost 2019 global temperatures.” The 2016 event was the last El Nino on record, and in turn 2017, where there was no El Nino prior, turned out to be the hottest year on record.
This time it is back, but much weaker than in previous years which could lead to major flooding and droughts.
However, El Nino is just one meteorological aspect affecting the planet’s climate.
Climate change is increasing year-on-year, which is also disturbing global weather systems.

CNS Canada – Despite above normal precipitation over the last couple of months, when comes to the drought, the Prairies are not out of the woods as winter approaches.
For next growing season, especially like this year, they are going to require frequent, reliable rain during the growing season,” he explained.
Patrick Cherneski of the National Agri-Climate Information Service said Canada has a probability of experiencing an El Nino in the 70 per cent range.
He said an El Nino would mean a warmer winter for Western Canada with less precipitation and that would contribute to overall drier conditions.
“Quite often the arrival of the conditions, the climate phenomenon, does arrive but over the past several years they arrive slower than expected and not at the magnitude expected.
In this case for Western Canada that would be a positive,” Cherneski said.
In light of this fall’s precipitation, Burnett said southern Manitoba remains below normal in terms of moisture and there is a chance for southern Saskatchewan and southern Alberta to receive late season precipitation.
“But at this time of year you tend not to get as much precipitation just because of the atmospheric dynamics are far more subdued,” he said.
As for the central Prairies, Burnett said they are a bit dry and that the northern Prairies almost have too much moisture.
In turn, harvesting in northern Alberta and northern Saskatchewan could be delayed to until spring.

The winter outlook in Western Washington continues to show higher-than-normal chances of warmer, with the possibility of drier conditions.
In the winter, a typical El Nino can lead to wetter-than-average rain in the south and drier and warmer conditions in the north.
"Although a weak El Nino is expected, it may still influence the winter season by bringing wetter conditions across the southern United States, and warmer, drier conditions to parts of the North," Halpert said.
There’s as much as a 75 percent higher chance that our winter will be warmer than normal in Western Washington.
There are equal chances for either a wetter, or drier winter.
NOAA says drought conditions are likely to persist, including some areas of the Pacific Northwest.
David Miskus with NOAA says the worst drought conditions in the Pacific Northwest are in Oregon and Southwest Washington.
Drought improvements for areas from the Cascades and areas west to the coast are expected.
It’s less clear for Eastern Washington, but conditions aren’t as sever there as they are in Oregon, which are expected to improve in the coming months.
This means that while it may be an El Nino winter, we will still see periods of cold temperatures and snowfall.

Heatwaves and bushfires are predicted in southern Australia thanks to a 70% chance of El Niño weather conditions, the Bureau of Meteorology has warned.
“This outlook on the back of such little rainfall and dry conditions makes it such a worry for people.” Australia had endured its driest September since rainfall records began in 1900, Duell said.
Close to 60% of Queensland is in drought, and parts of the state have been dry for the past seven years.
Farmers in drought-declared areas are eligible for relief payments and support services.
El Niño is the part of the El Niño Southern Oscillation (Enso) characterised by weak trade winds over the Pacific, which reduce moisture and rainfall in eastern Australia.
Sustained positive values above +7 typically indicate La Niña.
“Any given year there is a risk because El Niño is a normal part of our climate system.
We get an El Niño on average every two to five years,” Duell told the ABC.
“That puts the risk at any given year at about a 25% chance.
‘Don’t call it a disaster’: how to change the conversation about drought Read more “This is absolutely not the type of outlook I think that many people would be hoping to hear.” The bureau outlook also noted that the the Indian Ocean Dipole (IOD), another key climate indicator, was trending positive, further contributing to the dry conditions.

HARARE – A leading agriculture information portal has urged farmers to sign up for new crop insurance against predicted crop failure due to the looming El-Nino-induced drought.
The Farmers Voice warned farmers of the looming El Nino — a warming of sea surface temperatures in the Pacific which can lead to scorching weather in eastern and southern Africa.
Up until recently, farmers in Zimbabwe could only insure against hail, fire or frost.
But after many of years of planning and improvements in climate prediction technology, multi-peril crop insurance products have come onto the market.
The catch, of course, has been the cost.
Farmers Voice said “the government needs to promote insurance or make it part of its Command Agriculture package”.
There is general consensus that this year’s maize output will be way below potential.
The Famine Early Warning Systems Network — a leading provider of early warning and analysis on food insecurity — warned that between July and September this year, food crisis is expected across most typical grain deficit districts in the southern part of the country as stocks dry out.

Three-dimensional measurements of the central Brazilian Amazon rainforest have given NASA researchers a detailed window into the high number of branch falls and tree mortality that occur in response to drought conditions.
In a rainforest as vast as the Amazon, estimating the number of dying or damaged trees, where only branches may fall, is extremely difficult and has been a long-standing challenge.
Analyzing the three surveys, the team used the LiDAR data to detect new gaps in the canopy where a tree or branch had fallen in the months between observations.
During the non-El Niño period from 2013 to 2014, the branch and tree fall events altered 1.8 percent of the forest canopy in the study area, a small number on the surface but scaled up to the size of the entire Amazon, it’s the equivalent of losing canopy trees or branches over 38,000 square miles, or the area of Kentucky.
Tree and branch mortality was 65 percent higher during the El Niño drought period from 2014 to 2016, or 65,000 square miles, the size of Wisconsin.
"Because it’s a big forest, even a subtle shift in an El Niño year has a big impact on the total carbon budget of the forest," said Morton, referring to the balance between how much carbon dioxide trees remove from the atmosphere to build their trunk, branches, and leaves as they grow versus the amount that returns to the atmosphere when trees die and decompose.
Surprisingly, the scientists found that deaths for all tree sizes, as well as the number of smaller branch falls, increased at about the same rate.
If droughts were to preferentially kill large trees, it would boost the total amount of carbon that’s lost from drought as opposed to other disturbance types," he said.
To understand the relationship between the gaps seen by the airborne LiDAR system from above and the multiple layers of canopy and understory below, Morton’s colleague Veronika Leitold at Goddard and a team of collaborating scientists at the Brazilian Agricultural Research Corporation and the Federal University of Western Pará conducted field measurements underneath observed gaps in the canopy to measure the woody material that had fallen to the ground.
If the number of trees present declines on a large scale, that adds up to a lot of carbon dioxide left in the atmosphere to contribute to greenhouse warming, which can feed the cycle of the Amazon seeing more droughts in the future.

Early weather forecasts key to saving lives in drought – U.N.. ROME, June 19 (Thomson Reuters Foundation) – With droughts set to become more frequent due to global warming, delivering timely, long-term weather forecasts to farmers in the developing world will be key to limiting damage and saving lives, the head of the U.N. food agency said on Monday.
Droughts have killed more than 11 million people worldwide since 1900 and now affect double the land area than in 1970, according to the U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO).
Better access to reliable weather data and early warning systems could help farmers in rural areas get ready to endure long spells of no rain, said FAO director-general Jose Graziano da Silva.
"Most of the times poor rural communities in developing countries don’t even know that a drought is about to strike," he told a conference at the FAO headquarters in Rome.
Measures such as planting resistant crops and building water reservoirs can greatly reduce the impact of droughts, but international responses too often focus on emergency relief, said Graziano da Silva.
"People die because they are not prepared to face the impacts of the drought – because their livelihoods are not resilient enough," he said.
WMO secretary general Petteri Taalas said weather forecast accuracy had greatly increased in recent years thanks developments in satellite, computing and scientific research.
The last El Nino, a warming of ocean surface temperatures in the eastern and central Pacific that typically occurs every few years, subsided in 2016 and was linked to crop damage, fires and flash floods.
(Reporting by Umberto Bacchi @UmbertoBacchi, Editing by Ros Russell.
Visit news.trust.org)

The drought is over for almost all of Colorado.
"Water providers have no immediate concerns and expect reservoirs to fill."
That is a dramatic change from three months ago when eastern Colorado was in the grip of one of the worst droughts in recent memory.
It looked to be a long, hot summer.
While Logan and Phillips counties smoldered, the Denver Post was reporting that drought conditions were worsening over the eastern third of the state.
By late March the drought had spread to the entire I-25 corridor, and fire departments there were dispatching SCAT trucks with almost every call, just in case.
For eastern Colorado basins, Fenimore said, snowpack remains abnormally high for this time of year, and abnormal amounts of moisture in May have helped to end drought conditions here.
Climatologists caution, however, that the reprieve is temporary.
Beyond the fact that average temperatures will go up, however, there’s little agreement in exactly how much impact there will be.
"In all parts of Colorado, no consistent long-term trends in annual precipitation have been detected," the report said.

How El Niño forecasts can help prevent cholera deaths in Africa. The Conversation, May 14, 2017. Since it first emerged from the Ganges River delta 200 years ago, cholera has killed tens of millions of people around the world. It causes acute diarrhea that can kill quickly without proper treatment. Before the 1970s it was not unusual for healthy adults to die of dehydration within…

A total of 7.7 million people in Ethiopia are estimated to be in dire need of food aid in 2017 due to a worsening drought, spokesperson of the country’s National Disaster Risk Management Commission Debebe Zewdie said.
Speaking to Ethiopia’s official news agency ENA, Zewdie stated that especially the areas of Oromiya, Amhara, and Southern Nations, Nationalities, and Peoples’ Region (SNNP) were experiencing severe water shortages.
Ethiopia’s National Disaster Risk Management Commission already gave a joint statement with the U.N. office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) last week, saying that low rainfalls would cause the second harvest to fall out very poor, and that they were also fearing the spread of contagious diseases.
Ethiopia already suffered from reduced rainfalls in 2015 and 2016 due to a weather phenomenon called El Niño, which affected around 10 million people in the region.
His view was supported by the reports of local farmers who said that this was the first time in the course of generations that a drought hit that hard.
An Ethiopian pastoralist, who lost almost 700 sheep and goats, told Oxfam that not even his parents experienced such severe droughts.
Ethiopia is not the only country in the region affected by oscillations in rainfall.
A total of 12 to 13 million people are said to be in need of humanitarian assistance across the Horn of Africa region, according to the U.N. Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA).
In addition to those affected in Ethiopia, there are 2.7 million in Kenya, 2.9 million in Somalia and 1.6 million people in Uganda who will not be able to meet their nutritional needs on their own.
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