A powerful Super El Niño has arrived after a decade. The World Meteorological Organization (WMO) announced that sea surface temperatures in the central and eastern tropical Pacific have risen to record levels, bringing the full impact of the Super El Niño into effect. This is expected to shake global weather patterns and deal massive blows to economies, ecosystems, and local communities. Let us examine the concepts of El Niño and Super El Niño, alongside the severe impacts they will bring to the global village and South Korea.

El Niño occurs when the sea surface temperature in the El Niño monitoring zone near the equator of the South Pacific remains 0.5 degrees Celsius or higher above normal for five months or more. While Super El Niño is not an official standard term, it refers to a very powerful phenomenon where the sea surface temperature in the monitoring zone stays 2 degrees Celsius or higher above normal for several months, disrupting global baric pressure distributions. It occurred in 1982–1983, 1997–1998, and 2015–2016, and its impacts are far more extreme than those of a normal El Niño.

Before observation systems were streamlined in 1994, humanity faced El Niño completely unprotected. During the 1982–1983 Super El Niño, the world suffered massive damage from extreme abnormal weather. Shocked by this, the international community built real-time monitoring systems, making it possible to identify and prepare for developmental signs of El Niño and La Niña starting in 1994.

The 1997–1998 Super El Niño, considered the largest in the 20th century, lasted for over a year with sea surface temperatures in the monitoring zone 2.8 degrees Celsius above normal. South American regions such as Peru and Ecuador were hit by heavy rains exceeding 10 times normal levels, wiping out entire villages, and Pacific coastal areas like California in the US suffered massive human and property damage from intense storms. Conversely, Southeast Asia and Australia suffered from severe droughts and mega-wildfires due to drastically reduced seawater evaporation caused by low water temperatures. In particular, severe wildfires in Indonesia generated haze that covered all of Southeast Asia, causing respiratory patients to surge, grounding flights, and even affecting South Korea and Japan. South Korea also suffered fatal blows during this period, experiencing abnormal winter warmth followed by torrential summer rains in 1998 that caused hundreds of casualties and massive property losses.

The 2015–2016 Super El Niño acted synergistically with worsening global warming to push global temperatures to dangerous levels, spreading beyond agricultural damage into health crises such as infectious diseases like dengue fever and the Zika virus. South Korea also suffered severe damage from extreme summer heatwaves and droughts. A Super El Niño alters global climate into an abnormal state, triggering massive crop failures and shattering social stability.

The global village has entered the frightening whirlwind of climate crisis once again. As seen in past disaster cases, a Super El Niño is not a problem confined to a specific region, but a global catastrophe. It is time to strengthen thorough advance monitoring and climate change response systems to minimize human and economic damages.

[ⓒ Global Economic Times. 무단전재-재배포 금지]