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El Niño last year led to global sea level rise equivalent to dumping one quarter of the water from Lake Superior into Earth’s oceans, according to a NASA analysis.
“We’ve been tracking this El Niño really since it started about a year ago. And like a lot of El Nios, it caused a temporary spike in global sea levels around the world,” Josh Willis, a climate scientist at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Lab, told weather.com in a recent interview.
Willis and other scientists analyzed 30 years of satellite data tracking sea level rise. During that time, global oceans rose by about 4 inches, and at a pace that’s doubled.
“The rise in the oceans globally is happening more than twice as fast now than it was just 30 years ago,” Willis said. “So we’re seeing something happen that’s really unprecedented.”
The El Niño-boosted year contributed about a third of an inch of additional global sea level rise between 2022 and 2023.
How El Niño Makes Sea Level Rise Worse
“Normally the oceans have their warmest patch in the entire world in the Western Pacific, we call it the Western Pacific Warm Pool. And during an El Niño, this pool of warm water, it shifts more towards the Central Pacific and as it does, it drags the rainfall with it,” Willis said.
“Some of that rain winds up falling in the oceans instead of on the land.”
El Niño can also fuel atmospheric river storms that dump massive amounts of rain along the U.S. West Coast.
Rivers carry all that water right back into the ocean, Willis said.
The 2023 spike wasn’t unexpected, but the NASA scientists consider it a relatively large one. One reason for that is that a mild La Niña from 2021 to 2022 had an opposite effect that resulted in less sea level rise than expected.
Long-Term Trends Are What Matter
A surfer runs past beach erosion just south of the Huntington Beach Pier in Huntington Beach, California, on Friday morning, December 28, 2023.
(Mark Rightmire/MediaNews Group/Orange County Register via Getty Images)
The natural El Niño spike is happening on top of the accelerating sea level rise caused by warming oceans and melting glaciers and ice sheets fueled by global greenhouse gas emissions, specifically carbon dioxide. In the U.S., most carbon dioxide comes from burning fossil fuels for transportation and electricity.
“We’re watching global sea levels rise at an unprecedented pace right now because of human interference with the climate,” Willis said.
“So when these natural cycles take us for a wild ride, it’s even wilder because of the changes that we’re adding on top of them.”
That can mean more powerful storms, higher tides and increased flooding.
“It’s a constant reminder of just how big our footprint is on this planet’s climate,” Willis said.
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Weather.com reporter Jan Childs covers breaking news and features related to weather, space, climate change, the environment and everything in between.
