Another storm brews in the Pacific as El Niño juices up hurricane season

As Hawaii reckons with Hurricane Lala’s damage, yet another storm is brewing southeast of the Islands. This year’s developing El Niño is likely playing a role in the back-to-back storms, according to experts.  

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It’s rare for hurricanes to make landfall in Hawaii. Lala made the closest pass of any hurricane in modern history on the Big Island, according to Daniel Swain, a climate scientist for the University of California’s Agriculture and Natural Resources group. 

“The conditions really have to line up just right, and some of those conditions are random: You have to have a storm in the right place at the right time with the right trajectory,” Swain said during a recent online briefing. “But you also need ocean temperatures that are warmer than their historical baseline, and in Hawaii, that tends to happen during El Niño years.” 

El Niño, which the National Weather Service’s Climate Prediction Center recently reported is likely to reach historic strength this fall, can intensify the east Pacific hurricane season. Meanwhile, it has the opposite effect on hurricanes in the Atlantic. 

Lala marked the second named storm in the central Pacific season, which runs from June 1 to Nov. 30. On average between 1991 and 2020, the central Pacific has yielded 4.4 tropical depressions and named storms, Matthew Rosencrans, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s lead hurricane seasonal forecaster, told SFGATE. During La Niña years, the average drops down to 2.8, while El Niño years bump it up to 6.2. 

“Generally, El Niño means about one-and-a-half to two times more activity in the central Pacific than La Niña,” Rosencrans said.

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So far, for both the eastern and central Pacific, there have been nine named storms compared to the normal of eight storms for this time of year. 

“El Niño makes a much bigger difference in the central Pacific,” Rosencrans added. “It just makes the east Pacific a little bit more active, but you tend to get longer-lived and therefore stronger storms in the eastern Pacific. In the Central Pacific, you just get a lot more everything — more storms, longer, stronger, everything.”

The track of the next storm is still unclear. But as of 11 a.m. Pacific standard time on Wednesday, there was 90% chance of a tropical cyclone forming in the next 48 hours, according to the National Hurricane Center. “Interests in the Hawaiian Islands should closely monitor the progress of this system,” the center stated.