The world must prepare for a warm El Niño current, which will cause temperatures to rise to record levels this year: the chances will reach 60% from May to July and then increase to 70% between June and August and 80% between July and September, the World Meteorological Organization (WMO) said today in Geneva.
"The development of an El Niño will most likely lead to a new peak in global warming and increase the chance of breaking temperature records," said Petteri Taalas, head of the United Nations World Meteorological Organization.
El Niño is a warming climatic phenomenon of the central and eastern tropical Pacific, up to the coasts of Peru and Ecuador.
It repeats at intervals of 2 to 7 years and lasts 9 to 12 months.
It brings heat waves, droughts and floods to various parts of the world.
Specifically, rains over parts of South America, the southern United States, the Horn of Africa and central Asia, and droughts over Australia, Indonesia and parts of South Asia.
El Niño in summer feeds hurricanes in the east-central Pacific and holds them back over the Atlantic.
The opposite phenomenon, called La Niña, consists of the cooling of the same area of the central and eastern tropical Pacific.
Over the past three years, La Niña has been repeating itself constantly.
According to the World Meteorological Organization, the hottest year since scientific records, 2016, was due to the combined effect of a very powerful El Niño and man-made global warming.
"The world should prepare for the development of the Nino - warns Taalas -. It could bring relief from drought in the Horn of Africa, but could also trigger more extreme weather events. This underlines the need for the UN initiative 'Early warning for all ', to establish early warning systems for exceptional events in all countries of the world".
/cloudfront-eu-central-1.images.arcpublishing.com/prisa/W3IRDIOMUNDRFLIMJQYISDQ2OE.jpg)