Mark Hunt Articles
Mark Hunt weather corner; 127 - How a Super El Niño could shape your season
There’s been a lot of talk in the press and on social media regarding the development of a Super El Niño later this year and its potential effects on our weather.
A lot of the headlines have as usual been sensationalist in nature, under-written with a doom and gloom scenario for the U.K & Ireland.
So, what do we actually know?
Well, the first thing I’d advise is where you look to for balanced and factual information about what exactly is a Super El Niño event. In my view, The Met Office have the best steer on this, so for starters, take a look at their blog published in April.
The second thing to remember is that a Super El Niño event builds over time progressing to a peak and currently the peak is predicted to occur later this year, rather than this summer.
We also need to consider the fact that a Super El Niño event takes place some 10,000 miles away from our shores and between it and us, a lot of other processes occur which also impact our weather.
Image courtesy of The Met Office
These processes are known as teleconnections and El Niño / La Niña is but one of them. Some of the more significant ones are listed below:
- North Atlantic Oscillation
- Sudden Stratospheric Warming / Polar Vortex
- Arctic Oscillation
- Quasi-Biennial Oscillation
So, the above AND Super El Niño / La Niña events interact to change the shape, speed and position of the jet stream and thereby influence our weather on a general basis.
One of the problems of forecasting what might happen this winter and beyond is that past Super El Niño events occurred at a time when the global temperature was lower, much lower, and so we have another interaction which is hard to predict. You can see this from the graph above.
The most recent Super El Niño event took place in 2015/16 and that particular winter was characterised by a run of very mild, wet and windy weather.
Image courtesy of The Met Office
In simple terms, a Super El Niño event puts more energy into the atmosphere and that process may or may not impact our weather across the U.K & Ireland. More energy into the atmosphere does increase the risk of heatwaves, but at the same time, a warmer atmosphere holds more moisture. With every 1°C rise in air temperature, the atmosphere can hold 7% more water vapour. So, one possible effect is we may see an increase in variability in our weather, hotter summer temperatures followed by more intense rainfall.
We are already dealing with this as an island climate, variability in our weather has always been a feature. Just look at May 2026, the first half of the month we were -2.5°C cooler than the average, but by the end of the month we experienced our hottest May temperatures.
Future-proofing turf management is down to this, creating and maintaining your turf and infrastructure to be resilient to climate extremes, Super El Niño or no Super El Niño.
www.weatherstations.co.uk
Send your questions for Mark to: editor@pitchcare.com
