New Delhi, Mar 10 (IANS): El Nino and La Nina are climate patterns in the Pacific Ocean that can affect weather worldwide.
According to meteorologists, El Nino weather patterns this year may lead to deficit monsoon rainfall.
El Nino is the warm phase of the El Nino–Southern Oscillation and is associated with a band of warm ocean water that develops in the central and east-central equatorial Pacific, including the area off the Pacific coast of South America. La Nina refers to the periodic cooling of ocean surface temperatures in the central and east-central equatorial Pacific. It has the capacity to alter direction as well as velocity of the trade winds, which trigger the winter season in India.
For the third month running, the US government weather agencies on Thursday reiterated the possibility of El Nino conditions developing in late summer this year, which could be an adverse signal for monsoon in India this year.
According to meteorologists, the anomaly in temperature and rainfall is the result of alterations in the weather patterns. The intensity as well as frequency of western disturbances was on the lower side this winter season. Climate experts said that anomalies of cool temperature in the Pacific waters are likely to dissolve that will further impact the Indian monsoon adversely.
Western disturbance is known to drive weather activities and bring winter to Northwest India and the adjoining areas of Central India. Although January saw a good number of active western disturbances, they could not have any impact on the weather across the Indo-Gangetic plains.
An IMD official said that the ongoing trend of above normal maximum temperature can be attributed to the country's deficit rainfall that has been recorded for four consecutive months. Winter rains have been largely evading Northwest, Central, East and Northeast India.
The South Peninsula has been recording some rains on account of few low-pressure areas and depressions forming in the South Bay of Bengal, but their impact was confined to the southern parts only.
"La Nina is a climate pattern marked by colder-than-normal sea surface temperatures in the equatorial Pacific Ocean that tend to suppress global temperatures. However, global warming and changing climatic conditions tend to play a major role, which can be temporarily governed by these ENSO conditions but cannot completely outplay the effects of climate change," said G.P. Sharma, President, Meteorology and Climate Change, Skymet Weather.