After a year of dominance, El Niño's wrath has ended, but its climate-changing counterpart, La Niña, is nipping at its heels and could signal a return to drought for California.
El Niño is the warm phase of the El Niño Southern Oscillation, also called ENSO. The tropical Pacific climate pattern is the biggest driver of weather events worldwide and has been actively disrupting global temperatures and precipitation patterns since its arrival last summer.
The El Niño event has contributed to months of record temperatures in the oceans, extreme heat stress for coral reefs, drought in the Amazon and Central America, ...
