Dr. Dillon Amaya

For one thing, right now, a lot of the American Southwest is experiencing anything from moderate to exceptional drought.

And so in this case, a really strong El Nino that's going to bring a lot of rain to places like New Mexico, Arizona, Southern California, that is a reprieve.

That could be a drought buster that could help us get over the hump in terms of managing really sensitive water resources.

On the negative side of things, though, we are currently experiencing a really strong marine heat wave right now in the ocean along the U.S.

west coast.

And that's exactly what it sounds like.

That is a heat wave that's happening in the ocean, and that can have really negative marine ecosystem impacts.

And El Ninos have been known to exacerbate these sorts of events and help them stick around for a lot longer.

So that could be sort of the negative side of this event.

There's this massive marine heat wave off the coast of Southern California.

And there's a lot of fisheries that are on alert right now thinking about the impacts of this El Nino on very sensitive marine ecosystems.

Yeah, absolutely.

Corals are super sensitive to the temperature of the water.

Potentially.

You know, El Ninos do tend to drive marine heat waves around the globe.

And if a marine heat wave were to persist or exacerbate in places like off the coast of Florida and the Keys region where you have these really strong corals, it could lead to severe bleaching events.

Ocean heat waves are really interesting.

They are these subsurface boiling of the water, so to speak.

It's not quite literally boiling, but to maybe a passing fish or a seagrass or a coral, it's really uncomfortable.

You can get strong heat waves that are something like two to three degrees Celsius warmer than average and