“You can never really attribute, you know, one single weather event to climate change. It’s very difficult to do that,” says NIWA meteorologist Tristan Meyers. But, he says, different recent extreme weather events in New Zealand do have the “fingerprints of climate change” all over them.
The large red blob in the Pacific Ocean, representing warmer temperatures, is characteristic of El Niño conditions. Using data from September 2023, this map shows that the ocean is generally very warm. Photo: Ben Noll / NIWA
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As part of his job, Tristan works on a number of different forecasts: from on demand ‘now-casts’ to look a few hours ahead – maybe to help Fire and Emergency New Zealand deal with spreading fires – through to seasonal forecasts across a few months to help those dependent on the weather for their livelihoods prepare for what’s to come.
But the impacts of climate change are making his job trickier.
In general, the combination of El Niño in the Pacific and a positive Indian Ocean Dipole (the situation right now) should mean less large rainfall events for the north of New Zealand. But already the out-of-season Cyclone Lola, the earliest category five cyclone on record for the Southern Hemisphere, has bucked the trend.
“It’s a very, very tricky period to be forecasting and really we’re in uncharted waters,” says Tristan.
Listen to the episode to learn more about how forecasters use physical models, historical data and machine learning to try to look at what might be coming our way, and the things we should all prepare for in an El Niño year.
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