El Niño Could Be More Powerful Than Ever, And That's Good News For Chicago

By Kate Shepherd in News on Nov 17, 2015 9:29PM

Chicagoans have been hailing El Niño as their savior from another brutal, cruel Midwestern winter, even as the weather pattern could cause destruction in Southern California.

But there's more good news for the Midwest: Temperatures in key locations of the Pacific Ocean are much hotter now than they were during even the massive 1997 El Niño, according to the L.A. Times. That means that this El Niño phenomenon could be one of the most powerful on record, if not the most powerful.

An El Niño occurs when the surface temperature of the Pacific Ocean next to the equator is unusually high, which it has been for several months. The temperature reading in a key region of the ocean west of Peru was the highest above the average in 25 years of modern record keeping. It's possible there's even more warming to come, Daniel Swain, a climate scientist at Stanford University, told the Times.

The weather phenomenon causes alterations in the atmosphere that usually dramatically change global weather patterns, including a warmer and dryer winter for Chicago. A weather outlook for the months of December, January and February released last month predicts above normal temperatures and below normal precipitation, according to the Tribune.

No matter how strong this El Niño is, we can expect a milder winter. There's a 48 percent chance average temperatures will be above the normal 26.4 degrees and only a 21 percent chance that they will be below average, National Weather Service meteorologist Kevin Birk told the Tribune. There's a 40 percent chance that snowfall will be below average.

"El Niño is going to be a dominant factor this winter," Swain told the Times.