The Tropical Steam-Engine: How Does El Niño Warm The Entire Globe?

Environment





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PublicDomainPictures/Pixabay

We regularly hear about how El Niño events raise the temperature across much of the planet, contributing to spikes in global average temperature such as the one witnessed in 1998, with severe bush fires, droughts and floods.

Indeed, the extra warmth is typically much more apparent over land than in the oceans, despite El Niño being chiefly thought of as an ocean temperature phenomenon.

How is it that an event predominantly characterised by a warm blob of water in the tropical eastern Pacific can have such a pervasive effect on global land temperatures?