photo credit: Shutterstock/Randy Andy
Flooding along the Central California coast during a 2015 El Niño weather event. 

Forecasters are warning that a strong El Niño pattern is developing this year. KRCB’s Shandra Back speaks with Sonoma State University geology professor Nicole Myers about what the changing ocean and weather conditions could mean for the North Bay.

KRCB: In Northern California, a lot of people, when they think of El Niño, think of lots of rain. Is that a fair expectation?

MYERS: That is generally a fair expectation for El Niño. In very strong El Niños of the past, the Bay Area has gotten significant amounts of rain. So that is generally what we expect and generally what we would plan for.

KRCB: And if we do end up with a wetter fall-to-winter season, what are some of the biggest impacts we could see here in Sonoma County, or have we historically seen?

MYERS: We'd expect higher rainfall totals and the resulting flooding. Also, because the surface waters are warmer, in addition to higher precipitation, we expect more flooding along the coast and generally just slightly higher than normal sea levels.

So in the last year, think of where along the coast has flooded. Like when the 101 in the Marin County area flooded due to a king tide, we would expect that to be more likely with an El Niño scenario.

Another aspect for especially the Bay Area and all of the California coast is we're so reliant on our fishing industries. We have so much investment in that, and these warmer waters do play a really big role in the health of the communities along the coast, the marine communities.

The higher ocean temperatures mean there tends to be a little less oxygen. That's not great for the organisms. There's a higher chance of algae blooms. That comes with its own issues. So the marine life tends to be more destabilized during these events, and we should at least be aware of that as we go into this next season, that places like the Marine Mammal Center might need more support, because in the past, those organisms are some of the ones that have not done well during our El Niño years.

KRCB: Climate change is changing a lot about our weather. If we zoom out for a second, how might this affect El Niño?

MYERS: Climate change just makes it much harder for us to predict what will happen. What we're finding with climate change trends is just more extremity to the weather. The droughts are deeper, high precipitation events are more extreme. So if we're going into a very strong El Niño where we expect more extreme precipitation, then we should expect that much more extreme precipitation.

KRCB: What’s something about El Niño that you wish more people understood?

MYERS: We don't know what causes El Niño. We just have the ability to see the symptoms of it. As the surface ocean temperatures start to get warmer, and we see this uptip in the surface ocean temperatures and a change in the wind patterns, that's when the meteorologist can say there's a high chance of there being an El Niño. So we're seeing that trend. It is getting warmer.

That means the El Niño is very likely, but climate change makes it so much harder for us to know that that's what will happen. There's just that much more uncertainty in any of our forecasts as a result of the trends changing so significantly that the trends of the past can no longer really be applied to the trends of the future or even of the present.