What is El Niño and How Does it Affect Kentucky?

LEXINGTON, Ky. (WKYT) – Back at the beginning of June, Climate scientists at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s Climate Prediction Center declared that we were entering an El Niño pattern for our Weather – bringing global shifts in our climate.

El Niño is a natural climate phenomenon marked by warmer-than-average sea surface temperatures in parts of the pacific ocean – and while the Pacific Ocean is hundreds of miles away from us here in Kentucky – we might notice seasonal effects.

Dr. Andrea Erhardt, UK Professor and Oceanographer says that while it might be weird to think the ocean effect’s Kentucky’s weather, oceans are a player in our global weather setup – “The oceans are really big – so they can regulate the climate of the earth in a lot of really cool ways. One of the things they do is sort of where the heat is distributed in the ocean, that’s what El Niño is”

In order to best understand El Niño – we need to look at a global scale. Normally winds called trade-winds push warm surface waters toward part of the western Pacific, centralizing near Asia and Australia. However, in El Niño years, those winds will weaken, allowing for all of that warm surfacewater to centralize around parts of South America. This can warp our weather pattern giving us different conditions in different seasons. We really noticed El Niño during the winter time months when we might see dryer conditions specifically in Kentucky, but our friends just south of us might see wetter conditions.

Dr. Erhardt says that ”Everything is connected, right? You could take a ship and go through all the oceans together – all the weather patterns are all interconnected. But the Pacific Ocean is so incredibly big that when it does its sort of natural shifts back in forth about where the warm water masses will be – it effects the climate across the globe.”

So as we look forward to our weather predictions for the Bluegrass – we will remind ourselves of the activity in far away in the Pacific Ocean – can affect us right here at home.

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