El Niño 2015 Has Arrived – What Does It Mean For You And Your Travel Plans?

The notorious El Niño weather pattern has developed for 2015. While not exactly reminiscent of the ones that have been causing erratic weather patterns for the last two decades, this year’s El Niño could still play spoilsport to your travel plans.

After almost a year of El Niño being a no-show and then skipping its planned arrival date during late last year, the US’s National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) has announced that an El Niño weather pattern has developed. This year’s El Niño is expected to hang around until August and could mess around with your best laid travel plans.

An El Niño weather pattern is referred to the development of a warm band of water in the central and eastern parts of the Pacific. It can trigger strange and completely unpredictable weather events, such as heavy rain and unseasonable warmth in some areas, and cold snaps in others. Though El Niño isn’t always disastrous, it has been known to cause severe flooding and drought across the planet and has wreaked havoc on global weather on numerous occasions.

Early last year, researchers predicted that a similar event was brewing, and could take effect by December 2014. However, the weather has always been rather unpredictable and so is El Niño, who decided to be a no-show.

Still, El Niño is here now. Fortunately, it has arrived a lot later than expected and that means it has lesser time to mess with the weather patterns and screw with your travel plans. As an added bonus, meteorologists expect this year’s El Niño to be substantially weaker than any known previous instances.

Regardless of the cautiously optimistic outlook, weather can change for the worse anytime and many researchers believe the event could still push temperatures up to make 2015 the hottest year yet – a record that was set just a few months ago by a scorching 2014.

Speaking about the positive impact of El Niño, Californians were quite hopeful the weather pattern would bring relief from the drought the region is facing. But, because of the delay and the potency of this year’s El Niño, meteorologists aren’t too optimistic. Nonetheless, it will have some other big impacts around the rest of the world, such as potentially dampening the US Atlantic hurricane season.