Weather: and now we REALLY fear the return of the year Without SUMMER. Let’s find out what ‘Year Without Summer’ means
Thermal anomaly of 1816, the year without summer The year without summer would not be new, it really existed! We try to explain to you what “year without summer” means by making a brief temporal excursus.
Also known as the Poverty Year, 1816 was the year during which severe summer weather anomalies destroyed crops in northern Europe, the northeastern US states, and eastern Canada.
Today it is believed that those climatic aberrations were caused by the volcanic eruption of Tambora, on the island of Sumbawa in present-day Indonesia, which took place from April 5 to 15, 1815, an eruption that released large quantities of volcanic ash into the upper layers of the atmosphere. As is common following large volcanic eruptions, global temperatures dropped as sunlight struggled to pass through the atmosphere.
This was superimposed on two other important phenomena in that period: the Dalton Minimum, during which the Sun is believed to have given off less energy and the so-called Little Ice Age (still ongoing at the time), i.e. a general cooling phase of the Planet which, from the Middle Ages, lasted until 1850.
Don’t worry there are no volcanic eruptions in progress, the sun still works well and we are obviously not in an ice age!
But beware: it rains almost every day and it’s also cool! But what is happening at the hemispheric level? And above all: will there be consequences for next summer as well? To understand what to expect we must, as usual, analyze the seasonal maps which offer us an overview of the expected rainfall and temperatures for the coming months.
Furthermore, we need to widen our gaze to the entire global climate system, focusing in particular on what will happen in the middle of the Pacific Ocean.
Two important events alternate in this area: La Niña and El Niño: these are large-scale phenomena, observed on the surface of the tropical, central and eastern Pacific Ocean and capable of influencing global weather and climate conditions, respectively anomalous heating and abnormal cooling.
The names of these two phenomena, apparently a bit funny, are actually easily explained because El Niño means “the child” in Spanish, in fact the thermal anomaly generally reaches its peak around the Holy Christmas period, that is precisely that of the Birth of the Child Jesus. The voice is in Spanish because it touches Hispanic-speaking regions after the Colombian colonization. La Niña is nothing but the opposite of El Niño.
It is, therefore, respectively a cooling and a warming of the ocean surface. During a Niña episode waters are 1/3°C colder, while in Niño phases they are 1/3°C warmer and, as a result, global average temperatures also tend to increase
Meanwhile, what we do know is that NOAA, the US agency that deals with oceanic and atmospheric dynamics, has just announced that the surface waters of the Pacific Ocean are warming beyond expectations, kicking off the phenomenon known as El Niño that this year should be great.
Although El Niño in general leads to a global increase in temperatures, for the moment the Mediterranean summer is limping and not a little, in complete contrast to the global warming trend highlighted by time.
In the coming weeks we will see if the configuration will change or not.
2023-06-30 20:40:00
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