16 MONTEREY COUNTY WEEKLY December 21-27, 2023 www.montereycountyweekly.com Back in the winter of 1997, when an El Niño weather dynamic created the conditions for California to be drenched by rainfall, late comedian Chris Farley did a spot on the “Weekend Update” segment of Saturday Night Live that was ostensibly a weather report. He wore a frilly coat, not buttoned up and with no shirt underneath, and an out-of-frame wind machine in the studio blew his hair. “I am El Niño,” Farley said. “All other tropical storms must bow before…El Niño! Yo soy El Niño. For those of you who don’t habla español, El Niño is Spanish for…the Niño!!!” It stands the test of time as 25 seconds of comedy gold. That vignette helped make a lot of people aware of a phenomenon that occurs from time to time in the Pacific Ocean, but perhaps because it was such a wet winter that year, it may have left many people with the impression that El Niño conditions invariably bring more rainfall. That is not true. It increases the likelihood of above-average precipitation, but the dynamics of weather involve a complex interplay of variables where a change in a single one of them can profoundly shift outcomes. Take, for example, the winter of 2015-16, one of the strongest El Niño patterns in a generation, when only a slightly above-average amount of rain fell on the Central Coast. That’s because an ocean warming event off the West Coast at the time, commonly referred to as “the blob,” put a stop to other warm air moving in—it essentially became a wall that blocked off other systems. On Dec. 14, the Climate Prediction Center of the National Weather Service published its latest update of the El Niño conditions heading into what are typically the wettest months on the Central Coast, predicting a 54-percent chance of this winter’s El Niño pattern being one of the five strongest since 1950. El Niño conditions occur when the waters in the equatorial Pacific warm to above-average temperatures, and in a system where a lot of variables are in play, it can change weather even further north than the Central Coast. Air has a tendency to move, which is why “pressure” is a word so often used by meteorologists—an area of high atmospheric pressure next to an area of low pressure will transfer air to the latter. “The blob” created high pressure, which was a bulwark against the high pressure created by El Niño eight years ago. Rick Canepa, a meteorologist in the National Weather Service’s Monterey office, explains that the difference of temperatures in places improves the efficiency in shifts in weather systems, and that while there’s nothing firm that can be predicted for the winter to come, that contrast “should be helpful to get extra systems to develop. It only takes about three to five days for a storm system to spin up.” As for how the winter will shake out, it’s all informed speculation about a system with countless variables. “It’s extremely complex,” Canepa says. “It’s what keeps us on our toes here.” Wild Card This winter could be one of the biggest El Niño events in decades, but storms remain hard to predict. By David Schmalz A well-prepared onlooker watches the waves crash in during a storm near Lovers Point in January 2023. NEWS “It only takes three to five days for a storm system to spin up.” DANIEL DREIFUSS
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