Temperatures at the North Pole rose above freezing point Wednesday, 20 degrees Celsius above the mid-winter norm and the latest abnormality in a season of extreme weather events.
Environment
Dec 31, 2015
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The El Nino weather phenomenon, one of the worst in 50 years, has caused intense drought in southern Africa that will have a "devastating" impact on the region's food security, the UN food agency warned on Friday.
Environment
Feb 12, 2016
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69
Melbourne: Australian scientists have developed an innovative method using cores drilled from coral to produce a world first 400-year long seasonal record of El Niño events, a record that many in the field had described ...
Environment
May 6, 2019
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The level of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere increased at a record pace last year, US government scientists reported, raising new concern about one of the top greenhouse gases and the effects of global warming.
Environment
Mar 10, 2016
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The United Nations on Tuesday warned the world to prepare for the effects of El Nino, saying the weather phenomenon which triggers higher global temperatures is set to persist throughout 2023.
Environment
Jul 4, 2023
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101
El Ninos have become more intense in the industrial age, which stands to worsen storms, drought, and coral bleaching in El Nino years. A new study has found compelling evidence in the Pacific Ocean that the stronger El Ninos ...
Earth Sciences
Nov 23, 2019
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The main street of this dusty South African town is lined with empty buckets, marking each residents' place in line as they wait for their daily water ration to be brought in by unreliable trucks.
Environment
Jan 10, 2016
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56
May's temperatures broke global records yet again, as the northern hemisphere finishes its hottest spring on record, statistics released Tuesday by NASA showed.
Environment
Jun 14, 2016
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Earth got so hot last month that federal scientists struggled to find words, describing temperatures as "astronomical," ''staggering" and "strange." They warned that the climate may have moved into a new and hotter neighborhood.
Environment
Mar 17, 2016
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Several dozen Humboldt penguins sun themselves along the coast of an islet in central Chile where the majestic birds coming here to nest once numbered in the thousands.
Plants & Animals
Apr 28, 2013
0
1
El Niño-Southern Oscillation (abbrieviated as ENSO and commonly called simply El Niño), is an intensification of monthly or seasonal fluctuations in the air pressure difference between Tahiti and Darwin, Australia caused by warming of surface waters of the tropical Eastern Pacific Ocean that occurs every three to eight years. The name is from the Spanish for "the little boy", refers to the Christ child, because the phenomenon is usually noticed around Christmas in the Pacific near South America. A period of cooling in the tropical Pacific is the opposite extreme in the natural ENSO cycle and is called La Niña.
The mechanisms that sustain the El Niño - La Nina cycle remain a matter of research, but El Nino is associated with disruption of Pacific trade winds and a stronger than usual so-called Madden-Julian oscillation, which is the frequent and regularly occurring eastward progression of tropical rainfall over the Pacific.
El Niño is associated with floods, droughts and is linked to other weather disturbances in many locations around the world. El Niño's effects in the Atlantic Ocean lag behind those in the Pacific by 12 to 18 months. Developing countries dependent upon agricultural and fishing are especially affected. But El Niño's effects on weather vary with each event, and ENSO's intensity or frequency may change as a result of global warming. Research suggests that treating ocean warming which occurs in the eastern tropical Pacific separately from that of the central tropical Pacific may help explain some of these variations.
This text uses material from Wikipedia, licensed under CC BY-SA
