According to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), El Niño and La Niña are climate patterns in the Pacific Ocean that can affect weather worldwide, like causing wetter than normal conditions in the southern United States and warmer and drier conditions in the North during winter.
El Niño is when parts of the Pacific Ocean near the equator become warmer than usual, and La Niña is when those water areas are cooler than usual.
To understand why the earth's temperatures have increased over the last few years, more than normal, scientists are looking closely at weather patterns there.
David Legates of the Cornwall Alliance for the Stewardship of Creation can see how a recent news article on the topic, "Scientists Change How El Niño is labeled to Keep Up with Spike in Temperature," could be confusing.
"If you read the title and maybe the first paragraph or two, you get the impression [that] the water is warming, and El Niños are going through the roof in terms of temperature. So now, we have to change how that's happening," he relays. "But the reason they're changing it is they're saying it's not absolute temperature; it's relative temperature."
Legates tells AFN what that means.
"With a warmer world and temperatures getting warmer, we can't just base it on absolute values. We need to really base it on local values," he explains. "That's what the atmosphere is going to respond to anyway. If there's a warm body of water that's warmer than the surrounding area, that's going to have an effect. And it doesn't matter whether that's really warm or that's just warm. That should be what defines La Niñas and El Niños."
He says it is not simply about hitting a "magic number" above or below a certain temperature.
The traditional Oceanic Niño Index (ONI) relies on a departure from 30-year average that struggles to keep pace with changes in tropical sea surface temperatures, so, the Climate Prediction Center will now use the Relative Oceanic Niño Index (RONI) to better designate past events and predict future El Niño and La Niña events.
In other words, instead of just checking if the water is warmer or cooler than the old average, they compare it to the rest of the current tropical ocean. This means they will call some years La Niña, even though the waters are warm, because in relative terms, they are cooler than other parts of the tropical ocean.
Legates thinks this new labeling system will be helpful.
