El Nino inches towards monster level

The Agency for Assessment and Application of Technology’s (BPPT) weather modification technology center said on Thursday that the water temperature increase in the Pacific Ocean, where a band of warm ocean water develops causing a significant reduction in Indonesian rainfall, has reached the same level as that of 1997.

“This year there’s an increase of 1.8 degrees Celsius in water temperature, the same as what we had in 1997,” the center’s head, Tri Handoko Seto, told a press conference held by the Indonesian Disaster Experts Association (IABI) in Central Jakarta.

Seto said Java so far had bore the brunt of the weather phenomenon as indicated by the very low rainfall.

“The dry season in Java is especially severe this year. Since June, the rainfall in Java is less than 60 millimeters (mm) per month, even less than the average set by the BMKG for the dry season, which is at least 150 mm per month. It’s the same with what we had in 1997,” he said.

Many climate watchers have said that this year’s weather phenomenon, with rapid warming in the central and eastern Pacific, has all the ingredients to create another monster El Niño, like the one in 1997 that led to a spike in global temperatures.

William Patzert, a climatologist with NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in California, told The New York Times that many of the factors were in place for a big event, with ocean warming “that rivals what we saw with the great Godzilla El Nino of 1997 and 1998.”

A new research published in Nature Climate Change says the combination of extreme weather phenomenons that could trigger a monster El Nino will occur more often in the future due to climate change.

The study found that the worst combination of extreme weather patterns in the Indian and Pacific oceans would likely rise four-fold this century if greenhouse gas emissions continue on their current trajectory  as background warming from climate change makes rainfall shifts and heat wave conditions easier to generate.

Indonesia suffered greatly from the 1997 El Nino with it causing the greatest loss from forest and land fires in the history of the country, costing the nation US$2.45 billion as fires wiped out millions of hectares of forest and plantation areas.

The Meteorology, Climatology and Geophysics Agency (BMKG) acknowledged that this year’s El Nino had increased in intensity, reaching an index of 1.9, up from 1.6 in June.

However, that index, called the El Niño-Southern Oscillation (ENSO) index, is still below the peak index in 1997, which reached 2.59, BMKG climate spokesperson Evi Lutfiati said.

“Right now it’s still fluctuating between 1.8 and 1.9,” she told The Jakarta Post on Tuesday. “[But], we’re predicting the index to increase to 2.4 in October or November.”

Such an increase means Indonesia will suffer from a strong El Niño. The intensity of El Nino is divided into three categories: weak with an index between 0.5 and 1, moderate between 1 and 2; and strong between 2 and 3. 

Evi said Indonesia had only experienced such a strong El Nino twice before, one in 1982 and one in 1997.

BMKG chief Andi Eka Sakya also said that there were indications this year’s El Nino would be as severe as 1997. “The trend of 2015 El Niño’s strengthening is shown by the tendency of the pool of warm water to drift East and keep widening [in size] towards the same form as in September 1997,” he told the Post.

Although the El Nino had not reached its peak yet, many regions in the country have reported a prolonged dry season, with some regions in West Java, Central Java, Yogyakarta, East Java, South Sulawesi, West Nusa Tenggara and East Nusa Tenggara suffering from 60 straight days without rain, BMKG said.

This year’s El Nino could be compounded by a so-called positive Indian Ocean Dipole (IOD) just like in 1997. IOD also known as the Indian Nino is an irregular oscillation of sea-surface temperatures in which the western Indian Ocean becomes alternately warmer and then colder than the eastern part of the ocean. A positive IOD tends to cause droughts in adjacent land areas of Indonesia and Australia.

“The IOD now is already positive,” Evi said.