If you're wondering what is the reason behind the extreme weather the world is experiencing right now, it’s El Niño.
What is El Niño do you ask? Well, El Niño is a climate cycle in the Pacific Ocean with a global impact on weather patterns. The cycle begins when warm water in the western tropical Pacific Ocean shifts eastward along the equator toward the coast of South America. During an El Niño, the Pacific's warmest surface waters sit offshore of northwestern South America.
This year's El Niño weather event is already one of the three strongest ever recorded. NASA says El Niño conditions are still strengthening, and it could even rival the intensity of the record 1997 event that caused worldwide weather related disasters.
As the weather goes wild across the globe, the aid agency Oxfam has warned that this El Niño could leave tens of millions of people exposed to disease and hunger. "Millions of people in places like Ethiopia, Haiti and Papua New Guinea are already feeling the effects of drought and crop failure," Oxfam's Jane Cocking said in a statement. "We urgently need to get help to these areas to make sure people have enough food and water."
2015 is on track to be the hottest year on record, NOAA scientists say, and El Niño conditions could last until early summer 2016.
The weather phenomenon largely came to awareness during the 1997 El Niño. Then, it caused devastating flooding in the western U.S. and drought in Indonesia. It was blamed for deadly virus outbreaks in Africa and rising coffee prices around the world.
El Niños occur every two to seven years in varying intensity, and the waters of the eastern Pacific can be up to 4 degrees Celsius (7 degrees Fahrenheit) warmer than usual.
A strong El Niño also influences cyclone seasons around the planet. The warmer the East Pacific is, the more hurricanes it gets. The Atlantic Ocean sees fewer hurricanes, however, a result of increased upper level winds that prevent hurricanes from developing. That proved true for the 2015 hurricane season -- the Atlantic saw another relatively quiet year, while the Pacific broke a number of records.
The weather isn't the only thing that's affected. Warmer surface waters in the eastern Pacific drive away the cold-water fish that are the backbone of the fishing industry in much of Latin America. It was here that the phenomenon was first noticed by fishermen, who named it "El Niño" -- meaning "little boy" or "Christ child" in Spanish -- since it would often appear around Christmas.
The strongest El Niño was the 2.3 event in 1997-98. The current figure for this year's El Niño is 2.0 and has been rising for months -- and many are forecasting the strongest El Niño since records began in the 1950s.
The prospect of a record-breaking El Niño is worrying, given that the 1997 edition created conditions that killed an estimated 23,000 people and caused as much as $45 billion in damage. The world also heats up during an El Niño -- 1998 became the warmest year on record at the time, and 2015 is almost certainly set to become the hottest year yet again.
