Forecasters keeping an eye on warming waters in the eastern Pacific Ocean are warning it could be the precursor to one of the strongest El Niño events seen in years.
It could be as strong as the 1997 occurrence that caused weather-related havoc in far-flung parts of the world, from Australia to California, they say.
The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's Climate Prediction Center says this year's El Niño is "significant and strengthening."
"There is a greater than 90 percent chance that El Niño will continue through Northern Hemisphere winter 2015-16, and around an 85 percent chance it will last into early spring 2016," NOAA said in a statement of an El Niño Advisory.
With heated ocean waters surging eastward toward the U.S., the country's West Coast, particularly drought-stricken California, could see significant storms and flooding.
"This definitely has the potential of being the Godzilla El Niño," says Bill Patzert, a climatologist at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif.
However, it is unlikely to completely erase California's water deficit, says Kevin Werner, the director of western region climate services at NOAA.
"We would need something in excess of the wettest year on record to balance that deficit," he says. "A single El Niño is very unlikely to erase four years of drought in California."
El Niño's signal in the Pacific Ocean "right now is stronger than it was in 1997," the year of the strongest El Niño on record, Patzert says.
That event brought massive floods to the U.S. West, while Indonesia suffered severe drought and dry conditions in Australia led to a string of disastrous wildfires.
An estimated 23,000 people died because of the 1997 event that caused around $45 billion in damage globally.
It was the second-warmest and seventh-wettest winter since the beginning of record-keeping in 1895.
In an El Niño event, which happens every two to seven years, warmer waters usually confined to the western Pacific by easterly winds spread eastward toward North and South America when those winds slow down, or even sometimes reverse direction. El Niño usually brings heavy winter rain to much of the Southern and Eastern U.S. as well.
The warmer waters of an El Niño can heat the Earth's atmosphere and alter circulation patterns around the world, bringing intense storms to the West Coast of the Americas, while Southern Asia and Australia, normally rainy, become abnormally dry and subject to droughts.
The effects of an El Niño can be felt far beyond the Pacific, NOAA points out, contributing to a below-normal hurricane season in the Atlantic, while hurricane basins in the eastern and central Pacific see above-normal activity.
