El Niño's Causing Havoc Around the Globe — And Could Make 2015 The Hottest Year on Record

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The Pacific Ocean warm spell that's driving global temperatures to another expected high is projected to keep whipping up ill winds for much of the world into 2016.

It's too early to say whether year's recurrence of El Niño will end up being the most powerful on record, but it's expected to be among the top contenders, said Mike Halpert, the deputy director of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's Climate Prediction Center. More importantly, though, is what it's expected to do before it peaks sometime this winter, he said.

"We expect this will remain strong enough for the typical El Niño impacts to persist all the way through the winter into the spring," Halpert said.

The heavy rainfalls that are causing severe flooding in southern India's industrial hub of Chennai are "very typical" of the kind of intense weather that an El Niño can fuel, Halpert said. Those rains are coming at the tail end of an intense summer drought in Southeast Asia that aggravated Indonesia's forest fire crisis and a heat wave Indian authorities blamed for more than 2,000 deaths.

The last strong El Niño, in 1997 and 1998, was blamed for disasters that killed 23,000 people and did $45 billion in damage. It also drove global average temperatures to an annual record that stood for 16 years — and this year's readings are expected to set a second straight new benchmark, largely due to the current El Niño.

Related: Death Toll From Floods in India Jumps to Nearly 270

An El Niño forms when the trade winds of the equatorial Pacific Ocean slow down, warming the waters of the tropics. It usually brings more temperate winters to the Northern Hemisphere, but can aggravate natural hazards. A slow Atlantic hurricane season and a "very active" Pacific season — which included Hurricane Patricia, the strongest Western Hemisphere storm on record — "are all things we would expect with a healthy, strong El Niño," Halpert said.

"We would expect Canada, Alaska, and the northern part of the United States to have a milder-than-average winter," he said. "We would expect it would be wetter-than-average across the southern tier of the United States, and hopefully that includes California." That might be a boon to the desiccated Golden State, where an epic drought has reduced reservoirs to overgrown puddles.

In the Southern Hemisphere, where spring is giving way to summer, places like southern Africa tend to get drier seasons when El Niño arrives. But northern and eastern African countries like Kenya and Ethiopia are expected get heavier rains and could see flooding, as happened in the 1997-98 event.

What remains to be seen is what follows when the current El Niño fades, Halpert said. The phenomenon is often followed by a counterswing known as La Niña, when ocean temperatures fall below average for a stretch of time. The Niña formation that followed the 1997-98 El Niño lasted into 2001, bringing severe drought to the American Southwest — sorry, California — and record rainfalls to Australia.

"There's no way to say that we're going to see something like that, but it's certainly something to be aware of," Halpert said.

Related: Indonesia's Massive Fires Have Made Half a Million People Sick

Follow Matt Smith on Twitter: @mattsmithatl

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