El Niño May Charge and Strengthen Hurricanes in the Northeastern Pacific

El Niño may actually be responsible for charging the yearly tropical cyclones in the Pacific and Atlantic Oceans. Scientists have taken a closer look at the weather system that's responsible for warming sea surface temperature in the Pacific Ocean, and have found that it could make hurricanes stronger.

There's actually a mismatch in both timing and location between El Niño and the Northern Hemisphere hurricane season. El Niño peaks in winter, and its surface ocean warming occurs mostly around the equator. That's why researchers decided to investigate further to see whether it actually influenced hurricanes.

El Niño develops as the equatorial Pacific Ocean builds up a huge amount of heat underneath the surface. This turns into La Niña when this heat is discharged out of the equatorial region. Prior to this study, though, researchers largely ignored the huge accumulation of heat occurring underneath the ocean surface during every El Niño event as a potential culprit for fueling hurricane activity.

"We did not connect the discharged heat of El Niño to the fueling of hurricanes until recently, when we noticed another line of active research in the tropical cyclone community that clearly demonstrated that a strong hurricane is able to get its energy not only from the warm surface water, but also by causing warm, deep water-up to 100 meters deep-to upwell to the surface," said Fei-Fei Jin, one of the researchers, in a news release.

In fact, the researchers believe that heat beneath the ocean surface adds energy to intensify typhoons, which are tropical cyclones that occur in the western Pacific.

"El Niño's heat discharged into this region provides conditions to generate abnormal amount of intense hurricanes that may threaten Mexico, the southwest of the U.S. and the Hawaiian islands," said Julien Boucharel, one of the researchers.

The findings reveal that this weather system can actually help charge hurricanes. That said, there is some good news; the findings may provide a more skillful method to anticipate the activeness of the coming hurricane season by monitoring El Niño conditions.

The findings are published in the journal Nature.

For more great science stories and general news, please visit our sister site, Headlines and Global News (HNGN).