Many news sources have been providing stories on the current strong El Nino and its likely impacts on various parts of the world.  For example, Discover magazine and many others have compared this El Nino to the record El Nino of 1997-1998, and many scientists feel the current one may end up even stronger than that one.  You can read the Discover story here and a separate story by Earth Observatory here.

In this blog I’ve provided links in the past to the likely impacts of El Nino on water availability in California and how it might impact agriculture and water resources in that state.  How about impacts on other parts of the US?  Here are some more recent stories and blog postings:

Cliff Mass discusses the impact of the El Nino on water supplies in the Pacific Northwest here.  He predicts that water managers there may have to increase water restrictions soon due to the lack of snow pack and low flows, and warns that El Nino might provide limited relief in the PNW.

Jeff Masters in the Weather Underground blog discusses the likelihood of snow in the Northeast this coming winter and concludes that with so many interacting climate factors, no good prediction is possible at this point.

In the Southeast, in addition to the increases in rain and cloudiness that El Nino brings to the region in the winter months, there is a noticeable increase in tornadoes and severe weather along the Gulf Coast and in the Florida peninsula.  LiveScience has a brief article on this here.

A number of private forecasters have chimed in with their own detailed predictions for what El Nino will bring to the country.  For example, AgWeb provided a forecast from “Captain Kirk” here. It will be interesting to see if predictions from these forecasters come true in the coming months.

One impact that I read about today was a bit surprising to me.  Yahoo News reported here that due to drought conditions attributed to El Nino in Panama, the cargo size of ships passing through the Panama Canal has been reduced due to low water levels along the canal.  The last time this happened was in March 1998 with the last strong El Nino.  This will impact the amount of cargo the ships can carry through the canal, which could affect prices of items shipped that way.

Source: Thomas Lamadrid, Commons Wikimedia
Source: Thomas Lamadrid, Commons Wikimedia