El Nino on the Horizon, If Early, May Impact Monsoon

Hyderabad:India appears to be heading towards what is becoming a serious weather year. Close on the heels of the India Meteorological Department predicting a hotter-than-average summer that will come more heat wave episodes, the World Meteorological Organisation (WMO) on Tuesday said that conditions favouring formation of El Nino conditions were rising in Central and Eastern equatorial Pacific Ocean.

Typically, El Nino impacts the monsoon rain in India. Though the weather phenomenon is not expected to form fully till after July, the WMO’s Global Producing Centres forecasts indicated that in the May-July period, the probability of El Nino forming would rise.

“El Nino seems a certainty, it is quite clear that this will happen this year, all climate models point to that,” Dr Akshay Deoras, a research scientist at the National Centre for Atmospheric Science & Department of Meteorology, University of Reading, UK, said.

However, the forecasts are constrained at this moment, and El Nino forming depends not just on rising temperatures in the Pacific Ocean but also winds blowing in from Western Pacific. Right now there is a lot of heat in the region where El Nino forms, and the expectations are that strong westerly wind bursts could occur in March, he said.

Typically, El Nino starts forming in the spring and matures in winter. “But if it forms earlier than expected, it could result in some reduced rainfall across India,” he said.

A WMO news release said: “The most recent El Niño, in 2023-24, was one of the five strongest on record and it played a role in the record global temperatures we saw in 2024,” WMO secretary general Celeste Saulo was quoted as saying in the release.