Winter is months away, but the mere possibility that a major El Niño will whack places like San Diego late this year is stirring deep concern in the town square that is social media.
A flood tide of people are saying they’re worried that warm water from the equatorial Pacific will produce a “super” El Niño that will enhance winds, waves and rain storms on the West Coast.
The concern stems from a report from NOAA, which said last month that an El Niño appears to be taking shape. The agency cautiously noted that there’s a 61% chance this will happen, and that it could be anything from a very strong jolt to a piffle.
They were referring to a form of climate change that’s well-known in San Diego. In 1983, El Niño-enhanced waves slapped part of Crystal Pier into the ocean, leading to a hair-raising evacuation in the boardwalk area. A separate event that began in 1997 caused damaging floods and bluff slides up and down the coast.
NOAA isn’t waving red flags to get the public’s attention, at least not yet, partly because El Niño is hard to forecast.
A woman watches as large surf rolls to the beach past the Ocean Beach Pier which was closed because of the high surf after the first major El Nino storm of the season in San Diego, on Jan. 7, 2016. (Bill Wechter/AFP/Getty Images)
John Suk, director of the National Weather Service’s San Diego office, struck a similar cautious tone last week, telling the Union-Tribune, “This doesn’t raise alarm bells with me at all.”
The vibe and message are completely different on social media, which is making it difficult for everyone to figure out what’s going on.
Broadly speaking, people on platforms such as YouTube, Instagram and X are saying that a major El Niño not only seems likely but appears to be inevitable. Many of the people driving the conversation are scientists and meteorologists, some of whom include catchy videos and government data.
About a month ago, people began to routinely refer to this prospective change in the climate as a Super El Niño, a description that is not used by NOAA. And many users started to compare El Niño’s strength to that of Godzilla, the fabled and fictitious destroyer of worlds.
Some of this is sarcasm and humor. And some of it seems to reflect the public’s fascination with El Niño, with the phenomenon’s name popularized by the news media in 1983 after the system produced four to five big storms in one month on the California coast, notably in the San Diego area.
Before then, the public didn’t really have a word to describe the phenomenon.
But the overriding message is deeply serious. And it also reflects the concerns of many scientists who aren’t saying anything on social media.
“Confidence is building, the trends are there,” said Brian D’Agostino, who oversees wildfire and climate science at San Diego Gas & Electric. “El Niño is on the way.”
The social media uproar is likely to become even louder on Thursday. NOAA will issue an update that is widely expected to say that there’s deeper evidence that an El Niño is taking shape.
The update comes at a moment when an already complicated phenomenon is becoming even harder to understand, and potentially more dangerous.
Brent Fish, an aquarist at Birch Aquarium at Scripps Institution of Oceanography, takes the surface and the sea bottom temperature Thursday by using probes lowered from a hatch which opens over Scripps Pier. (John Gastaldo / For The San Diego Union-Tribune)
The ocean temperature on the West Coast has soared in recent months, rising 3 to 7 degrees above normal in places such as La Jolla Shores, according to UC San Diego’s Scripps Institution of Oceanography.
The water is so warm that seabirds have been washing ashore dead or ending up in rehabilitation facilities, says Tammy Russell, an ornithologist at Scripps.
The marine heatwave was caused by unusually long periods of sunshine, an effect that will linger. Scientists are worried that this warmth will be amplified by warmth from an El Niño, resulting in powerful winter storms.
There’s no guarantee of this. “The research is still being done on what impacts this will have,” said D’Agostino, who is responsible for spotting storms that could damage SDG&E’s delivery system.
Brent Fish, an aquarist at Scripps Institution of Oceanography, takes hold of a Niskin sampling bottle, left, used for taking seawater samples from just above the ocean bottom over Scripps Pier. He will then measure the temperature of the water and record it, a measurement that is taken daily. (John Gastaldo / For The San Diego Union-Tribune)
But NOAA says the usually warm water between Hawaii and Baja California could cause tropical storms and hurricanes to move closer to Southern California.
The fact that this is even a possibility speaks to the extraordinary nature of El Niño, a pattern change that originates 2,000 to 3,000 miles south-southwest of San Diego.
The Pacific trade winds in that region usually blow from east to west, sending lots of warm surface water toward Asia. But the water occasionally flows in the opposite direction, and some of it reaches the West Coast, where it pumps heat and moisture into the atmosphere, making winter storms stronger.
That, in short, is an El Niño.
The system isn’t entirely bad. At times, it delivers heavy rain to Southern California in the fall, greatly diminishing the threat of wildfires. It also makes the ocean warmer, causing such popular sportfish as yellowtail and Pacific bonito to more deeply venture into Southern California waters, thrilling anglers. The fishing was so good in late 1997 that traffic jams developed at boat ramps in Orange County.
But El Niño also can be a big, bad bruiser — a point underscored by the trouble it caused in late 1982 and early 1983. Storms heavily damaged piers in Imperial Beach, San Diego, Seal Beach, Huntington Beach, Santa Monica and Malibu. Mudslides closed parts of the Pacific Coast Highway throughout the region. And coastal cliffs shifted and gave way, damaging many homes. The onslaught caused more than $1 billion in damage.
El Niños aren’t like hurricanes, whose evolution, power and movement can be skillfully forecast by scientists. That’s because the mechanics of El Niño aren’t well understood, a problem that led to a big mistake in 2015. NOAA said that El Niño storms would bring unusually heavy rain to areas like San Diego County, where the precipitation turned out to be roughly average. Ruinous storms didn’t appear.
“We didn’t have enough research to really know what was driving El Niños then,” said Shang-Ping Xie, a Scripps climate researcher who was recently elected to the elite National Academy of Sciences.
“These tropical systems are very chaotic.”
A decade later, the nature of El Niño is better understood. But it’s far from complete at a moment when there’s lots of unusually warm water everywhere.
The data can “show a shift in statistics that are in favor of an El Niño forming,” Xie said on Wednesday. “But it doesn’t guarantee that it will happen.”