Global warming could worsen Australia, India droughts

Office workers walk past a mural of a drought scene in the business district of Melbourne in this July 1, 2008 file photo.

HONG KONG (Reuters) - Global warming may have spawned a new type of El Nino in the central Pacific and this could worsen the droughts in Australia and India, a new study by researchers in South Korea and the United States has found.

While the conventional El Nino is a warm body of water stretching across the tropical Eastern Pacific, this new El Nino is a horseshoe-shaped region of warm ocean in the central Pacific flanked by unusually cooler waters, they wrote in a paper published in the latest issue of Nature.

"This new type of El Nino appeared in the recent decade and from our analysis, it may be due to global warming," lead researcher Sang-Wook Yeh of the Korea Ocean Research and Development Institute told Reuters by telephone.

Yeh and his colleagues applied Pacific Ocean sea surface temperature data from the past 150 years to 11 global warming models developed by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.

Eight of them showed global warming conditions will increase the incidence of the new El Nino.

"The results described in this paper indicate that the global impacts of El Nino may significantly change as the climate warms," said Yeh.

"This type of El Nino will bring more drought to India and Australia."

Ben Kirtman, co-author of the study and professor of meteorology and physical oceanography at the University of Miami's Rosentstiel School of Marine and Atmospheric Science, said the new El Nino may overshadow the old El Nino, which helped shield the United States and Caribbean from severe hurricanes.

This means the protective shield of the old El Nino may be on the wane.

"Currently, we are in the middle of a developing eastern Pacific El Nino event, which is part of why we're experiencing such a mild hurricane season in the Atlantic," said Kirtman in a statement.

Kirtman expects the current El Nino event to end next spring, which he expects may bode for a more intense Atlantic hurricane season in 2010.

(Reporting by Tan Ee Lyn; Editing by Jerry Norton)