Wednesday July 9, 2025
The Cool Down —
New research methodologies and tools have uncovered a link between the El Niño and La Niña climate patterns in the Pacific Ocean and coastlines.
New research published in Communications Earth and Environment used satellite data to examine waterlines along the Pacific coast in the United States, showing how they have changed over time.
What’s happening?
El Niño and La Niña are climate patterns in the Pacific Ocean that have far-reaching impacts on the weather.
El Niño occurs when the Pacific Ocean’s central and eastern waters become unusually warm, which changes wind patterns and can lead to warmer and wetter winters in North America and drier conditions in Australia and Southeast Asia.
La Niña works in the opposite way. When those Pacific Ocean water regions are cooler than normal, it can cause cooler, wetter weather in the Pacific Northwest and drier, hotter conditions in the southern United States.
The new satellite research demonstrates that waterlines in the Pacific Northwest can shift more than 25 meters (82 feet) seasonally, while waterlines in Southern California only move about 10 (32 feet), as Maven’s Notebook summarized.
The study also found that El Niño years have a stronger soil erosion impact on Southern California, while these climate patterns have less predictable impacts on the Pacific Northwest.
“We’ve learned a great deal about the nuances of shoreline variability on the U.S. West Coast,” said USGS Research Oceanographer Dr. Sean Vitousek, a co-author of the study.
Why are El Niño and La Niña important?
Both of these cycles have longstanding climate patterns, but as the effects of human-caused climate change worsen, the patterns are losing their predictability and increasing in severity.
During the most recent El Niño from 2023 to 2024, global temperatures reached record highs.
A 2015 study found that extreme La Niña events could nearly double in frequency, from one in every 23 years to one in every 13 years, if pollution continues at its current rates.
These changes add fuel to the already volatile extreme weather patterns that we have seen as a result of the changing climate. As journalist Molly Wood describes, rising temperatures around the world are “basically steroids for weather.”
Supercharged weather events are dangerous and deadly for communities, both human and animal.
What’s being done about the changing climate?
To reduce the negative impacts of the overheating planet, we need to reduce the amount of dirty energy that we burn. This means cutting back on sources like oil and natural gas in favor of solar and wind.
As Australia’s Climate Council notes, the only way to stop El Niño’s patterns from getting worse is to cut climate pollution as much as possible and as quickly as possible.