With the talk about the onset of El Nino I was wondering if this will bring more wind, especially the NEsters this summer. Any thought?

bennie said...

I am no expert on this but I'll have a go. El nino brings big dry spells for australia, especially the east coast. much of our weather is goverened by ocean currents. El nino pushes the warm eastern pacific currents and it's associated precipitation west towards the americas, while cooler ocean currents move east towards australia. Seabreeze(NE winds on the south east coast) happens during high pressure systems, when warm air over land rises compared to the cooler air over the sea, so the cooler sea air rushes in to fill the place of the now higher up over land air. So if El nino brings cooler than normal ocean currents, combinded with large high pressure systems, then you have to sumise that there will be larger than normal ocean to land temp differentials, which would result in lots of stronger than average seabreezes for the southeast coast of australia. Having said that I was of the understanding that el nino was thought to happen about once every 8 or so years, and I think it's only been about 3 years since the last el nino.

My recollection of the big El Nino event in the early 80s' (when windsurfing really took off) is that the NE'rs on the East Coast were stronger and very consistent-as was the NE/Southerly Buster rotation. So, sounds good for kiters-sucks for farmers (drought).

Anyone know what effect it has on the West Coast? Summer of 06/07 wasn't all that spectacular, but I'm led to believe (I wasn't here) that 05/06 was worse? 08/09 was the best one I've been in Perth for.

I recall el nino meaning something along the lines of unpredictable, like a child..

To be safe I recommend we all quit working. That way, we will all be at the beach ready for every breeze.

Its the only way to be safe.

How does El Nino affect us Melburnians? Our regular Seabreeze is a SWer. This summer wasn't too bad (From January on anyway - out 4 times a week). Anyone got any (constructive input)


... Move to Sydney is NOT constructive input

got this from the Bom website http://www.bom.gov.au/climate/ahead/ENSO-summary.shtml

Predictions Point To Likely El Ni?o
Summary

As detailed in our ENSO Wrap-up, more evidence of a developing El Ni?o event has emerged in the past month. Sea surface temperatures (SST) over some of the equatorial tropical Pacific Ocean have warmed to above 1?C above normal, Trade Winds have been weaker than normal and the SOI remains negative at around #8722;2.

All international coupled climate models surveyed here are predicting warming of Pacific Ocean SST in the outlook period and for SST to remain above El Ni?o thresholds throughout most of the second half of 2009. Forecasts from one of the models has slower and weaker warming (BCC_CGCM, which may be due to the lower initial SST in these forecasts) than the the other six, but all seven models predict El Ni?o conditions being established by the southern spring at the latest. There is now more agreement between the models than one month ago and predictability of ENSO conditions is high at this time of year. In this light the probability of an El Ni?o event occuring in 2009 is high; a definite increase from one month ago.
Model Outlooks