After a record-breaking hot summer, 2023 may have another extraordinarily warm season in store, with this winter possibly due to be the hottest on record.
Due to the combined effects of the warming climate and El Niño, there is a 95 percent chance that the global average surface temperature this winter will set a new record high, notably in the U.S. and Eurasia, according to a new study in the journal Advances in Atmospheric Sciences.
This comes as 2023 is announced as the hottest year ever recorded by the U.N., following a sweltering summer and unseasonably warm fall. Between June and October this year, average temperatures worldwide were 0.57 degrees Celsius—1.03 degrees Fahrenheit—warmer than the 1991-2020 average. August alone was 1.2 degrees F warmer than the August average, while September was 1.24 degrees F warmer than the average September.
"The previous three years of La Niña provided a reservoir of heat in the tropical oceans. The eruption of El Niño this year, following that period, was an inevitable outcome," Fei Zheng, an associate professor at the Institute of Atmospheric Physics, Chinese Academy of Science, told Newsweek. "This year's El Niño event released a significant amount of heat into the atmosphere, further exacerbating the rapid rise in global surface temperatures from summer 2023 onwards. As a result, this year's global average surface temperature is set to significantly surpass historical records and is nearing the 1.5 degrees C climate change threshold."
In the Advances in Atmospheric Sciences paper, the authors predicted this winter's record-breaking warmth using multiple self-developed climate prediction systems, which predicted a moderate to strong eastern Pacific El Niño this winter.
El Niño is a pattern of weather in the Pacific Ocean that occurs once every two to seven years. It comes due to warming waters and weakened trade winds, causing warmer waters and the Pacific jet stream to be pushed toward the U.S. West Coast. "Strong" El Niños are defined by having a water temperature anomaly of at least 1.5 degrees C [2.7 degrees Fahrenheit] above average.
"It's a deafening cacophony of broken records," Petteri Taalas, chief of the U.N.'s World Meteorological Organization, said on Thursday. "Greenhouse gas levels are record high. Global temperatures are record high. Sea level rise is record high. Antarctic sea ice is record low."
This stronger El Niño may cause increased anticyclone activity in the Northwest Pacific, leading to strange changes in winter weather across North America and East Asia.
"An El Niño event favors wetter winters across the south and the southwestern United States and drier and warmer winters in the Pacific Northwest," Aaron Levine, a research scientist at the Cooperative Institute for Climate, Ocean and Ecosystem Studies at the University of Washington, previously told Newsweek.
The U.S. Climate Prediction Center (CPC) also recently predicted that there is a 35 percent chance of a "historically strong" El Niño between November and January, with a greater than 55 percent chance of at least a "strong" El Niño persisting through January to March 2024. Historically strong events come with a 2-degree Celsius [3.6 degrees Fahrenheit] anomaly above average.
"The impact on the U.S. will vary regionally. Current predictions indicate that some parts of the U.S. will experience comparatively lower temperatures this winter, suggesting more frequent cold air activity," Zheng said.
This year's El Niño may tip next year's average temperature past the worldwide 1.5-degree Celsius [2.7 degrees Fahrenheit] threshold set at the COP21 conference in 2015.
"It's practically sure that during the coming four years we will hit this 1.5, at least on temporary basis," Taalas said in an interview coinciding with the COP28 climate conference in Dubai, the Associated Press reported. "And in the next decade we are more or less going to be there on a permanent basis."
Update 12/4/23 12:18 p.m. ET: This article was updated with comment from Fei Zheng.
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