̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge - weather

Opinion: AI can democratise weather forecasting

lw355 — Tue, 01 Apr 2025 14:12:44 +0000

AI will give us the next leap forward in forecasting the weather, says Richard Turner, and make it available to all countries, not just those with access to high-quality data and computing resources.

Fully AI driven weather prediction system could start revolution in forecasting

sc604 — Thu, 20 Mar 2025 15:56:54 +0000

̽��ֱ��system, Aardvark Weather, has been supported by the Alan Turing Institute, Microsoft Research and the European Centre for Medium Range Weather Forecasts. It provides a blueprint for a new approach to weather forecasting with the potential to transform current practices. The results are reported in the journal Nature.

“Aardvark reimagines current weather prediction methods offering the potential to make weather forecasts faster, cheaper, more flexible and more accurate than ever before, helping to transform weather prediction in both developed and developing countries,” said Professor Richard Turner from Cambridge’s Department of Engineering, who led the research. “Aardvark is thousands of times faster than all previous weather forecasting methods.”

Current weather forecasts are generated through a complex set of stages, each taking several hours to run on powerful supercomputers. Aside from daily usage, the development, maintenance and use of these systems require significant time and large teams of experts.

More recently, research by Huawei, Google, and Microsoft has shown that one component of the weather forecasting pipeline, the numerical solver (which calculates how weather evolves over time), can be replaced with AI, resulting in faster and more accurate predictions. This combination of AI and traditional approaches is now being used by the European Centre for Medium Range Weather Forecasts (ECMWF).

But with Aardvark, researchers have replaced the entire weather prediction pipeline with a single, simple machine learning model. ̽��ֱ��new model takes in observations from satellites, weather stations and other sensors and outputs both global and local forecasts.

This fully AI driven approach means predictions that were once produced using many models – each requiring a supercomputer and a large support team to run – can now be produced in minutes on a desktop computer.

When using just 10% of the input data of existing systems, Aardvark already outperforms the United States national GFS forecasting system on many variables. It is also competitive with United States Weather Service forecasts that use input from dozens of weather models and analysis by expert human forecasters.

“These results are just the beginning of what Aardvark can achieve,” said first author Anna Allen, from Cambridge’s Department of Computer Science and Technology. “This end-to-end learning approach can be easily applied to other weather forecasting problems, for example hurricanes, wildfires, and tornadoes. Beyond weather, its applications extend to broader Earth system forecasting, including air quality, ocean dynamics, and sea ice prediction.”

̽��ֱ��researchers say that one of the most exciting aspects of Aardvark is its flexibility and simple design. Because it learns directly from data it can be quickly adapted to produce bespoke forecasts for specific industries or locations, whether that's predicting temperatures for African agriculture or wind speeds for a renewable energy company in Europe.

This contrasts to traditional weather prediction systems where creating a customised system takes years of work by large teams of researchers.

“ ̽��ֱ��weather forecasting systems we all rely on have been developed over decades, but in just 18 months, we’ve been able to build something that’s competitive with the best of these systems, using just a tenth of the data on a desktop computer,” said Turner, who is also Lead Researcher for Weather Prediction at the Alan Turing Institute.

This capability has the potential to transform weather prediction in developing countries where access to the expertise and computational resources required to develop conventional systems is not typically available.

“Unleashing AI’s potential will transform decision-making for everyone from policymakers and emergency planners to industries that rely on accurate weather forecasts,” said Dr Scott Hosking from ̽��ֱ��Alan Turing Institute. “Aardvark’s breakthrough is not just about speed, it’s about access. By shifting weather prediction from supercomputers to desktop computers, we can democratise forecasting, making these powerful technologies available to developing nations and data-sparse regions around the world.”

“Aardvark would not have been possible without decades of physical-model development by the community, and we are particularly indebted to ECMWF for their ERA5 dataset which is essential for training Aardvark,” said Turner.

“It is essential that academia and industry work together to address technological challenges and leverage new opportunities that AI offers,” said Matthew Chantry from ECMWF. “Aardvark’s approach combines both modularity with end-to-end forecasting optimisation, ensuring effective use of the available datasets."

“Aardvark represents not only an important achievement in AI weather prediction but it also reflects the power of collaboration and bringing the research community together to improve and apply AI technology in meaningful ways,” said Dr Chris Bishop, from Microsoft Research.

̽��ֱ��next steps for Aardvark include developing a new team within the Alan Turing Institute led by Turner, who will explore the potential to deploy Aardvark in the global south and integrate the technology into the Institute’s wider work to develop high-precision environmental forecasting for weather, oceans and sea ice.

Reference:
Anna Allen, Stratis Markou et al. ‘End-to-end data-driven weather prediction.’ Nature (2025). DOI: 10.1038/s41586-025-08897-0

Adapted from a media release by ̽��ֱ��Alan Turing Institute

A new AI weather prediction system, developed by researchers from the ̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge, can deliver accurate forecasts tens of times faster and using thousands of times less computing power than current AI and physics-based forecasting systems.

̽��ֱ��Alan Turing Institute

Professor Richard Turner using Aardvark Weather

̽��ֱ��text in this work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License. Images, including our videos, are Copyright © ̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge and licensors/contributors as identified. All rights reserved. We make our image and video content available in a number of ways – on our main website under its Terms and conditions, and on a range of channels including social media that permit your use and sharing of our content under their respective Terms.

Yes

2023 was the hottest summer in two thousand years

sc604 — Tue, 14 May 2024 15:00:00 +0000

Although 2023 has been reported as the hottest year on record, the instrumental evidence only reaches back as far as 1850 at best, and most records are limited to certain regions.

Now, by using past climate information from annually resolved tree rings over two millennia, scientists from the ̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge and the Johannes Gutenberg ̽��ֱ�� Mainz have shown how exceptional the summer of 2023 was.

Even allowing for natural climate variations over hundreds of years, 2023 was still the hottest summer since the height of the Roman Empire, exceeding the extremes of natural climate variability by half a degree Celsius.

“When you look at the long sweep of history, you can see just how dramatic recent global warming is,” said co-author Professor Ulf Büntgen, from Cambridge’s Department of Geography. “2023 was an exceptionally hot year, and this trend will continue unless we reduce greenhouse gas emissions dramatically.”

̽��ֱ��results, reported in the journal Nature, also demonstrate that in the Northern Hemisphere, the 2015 Paris Agreement to limit warming to 1.5C above pre-industrial levels has already been breached.

Early instrumental temperature records, from 1850-1900, are sparse and inconsistent. ̽��ֱ��researchers compared early instrumental data with a large-scale tree ring dataset and found the 19th century temperature baseline used to contextualise global warming is several tenths of a degree Celsius colder than previously thought. By re-calibrating this baseline, the researchers calculated that summer 2023 conditions in the Northern Hemisphere were 2.07C warmer than mean summer temperatures between 1850 and 1900.

“Many of the conversations we have around global warming are tied to a baseline temperature from the mid-19th century, but why is this the baseline? What is normal, in the context of a constantly-changing climate, when we’ve only got 150 years of meteorological measurements?” said Büntgen. “Only when we look at climate reconstructions can we better account for natural variability and put recent anthropogenic climate change into context.”

Tree rings can provide that context, since they contain annually-resolved and absolutely-dated information about past summer temperatures. Using tree-ring chronologies allows researchers to look much further back in time without the uncertainty associated with some early instrumental measurements.

̽��ֱ��available tree-ring data reveals that most of the cooler periods over the past 2000 years, such as the Little Antique Ice Age in the 6th century and the Little Ice Age in the early 19th century, followed large-sulphur-rich volcanic eruptions. These eruptions spew huge amounts of aerosols into the stratosphere, triggering rapid surface cooling. ̽��ֱ��coldest summer of the past two thousand years, in 536 CE, followed one such eruption, and was 3.93C colder than the summer of 2023.

Most of the warmer periods covered by the tree ring data can be attributed to the El Niño climate pattern, or El Niño-Southern Oscillation (ENSO). El Niño affects weather worldwide due to weakened trade winds in the Pacific Ocean and often results in warmer summers in the Northern Hemisphere. While El Niño events were first noted by fisherman in the 17th century, they can be observed in the tree ring data much further back in time.

However, over the past 60 years, global warming caused by greenhouse gas emissions are causing El Niño events to become stronger, resulting in hotter summers. ̽��ֱ��current El Niño event is expected to continue into early summer 2024, making it likely that this summer will break temperature records once again.

“It’s true that the climate is always changing, but the warming in 2023, caused by greenhouse gases, is additionally amplified by El Niño conditions, so we end up with longer and more severe heat waves and extended periods of drought,” said Professor Jan Esper, the lead author of the study from the Johannes Gutenberg ̽��ֱ�� Mainz in Germany. “When you look at the big picture, it shows just how urgent it is that we reduce greenhouse gas emissions immediately.”

̽��ֱ��researchers note that while their results are robust for the Northern Hemisphere, it is difficult to obtain global averages for the same period since data is sparse for the Southern Hemisphere. ̽��ֱ��Southern Hemisphere also responds differently to climate change, since it is far more ocean-covered than the Northern Hemisphere.

̽��ֱ��research was supported in part by the European Research Council.

Reference:
Jan Esper, Max Torbenson, Ulf Büntgen. ‘2023 summer warmth unparalleled over the past 2,000 years.’ Nature (2024). DOI: 10.1038/s41586-024-07512-y

Researchers have found that 2023 was the hottest summer in the Northern Hemisphere in the past two thousand years, almost four degrees warmer than the coldest summer during the same period.

When you look at the long sweep of history, you can see just how dramatic recent global warming is

Ulf Büntgen

trekandshoot via Getty Images

Morning sun over Los Angeles, USA.

Yes

Death tolls from climate disasters will ‘balloon’ without investment in Africa’s weather stations

fpjl2 — Mon, 14 Aug 2023 09:43:37 +0000

̽��ֱ��climate crisis is increasing the frequency and intensity of floods, droughts and heatwaves, with Africa expected to be among the global regions hit hardest.

Yet the systems and technologies across the continent that monitor and forecast weather events and changes to water levels are “missing, outmoded or malfunctioning” – leaving African populations even more exposed to climate change.

This is according to a team of risk experts and climatologists from the UK and Africa led by the ̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge, who warn that without major and rapid upgrades to 'hydromet infrastructure', the damage and death toll caused by climate-related disasters across Africa will “balloon”.

Writing in the journal Nature, the authors point to latest research showing that – over the last two decades – the average number of deaths caused by a flooding event in Africa is four times higher than the European and North American average per flood.

When investigating this disparity, the team looked at World Meteorological Organization (WMO) data and found the entire continent of Africa has just 6% of the number of radar stations as the US and Europe’s combined total, despite having a comparable population size and a third more land.*

Radar stations detect weather fluctuations and rainfall as well as long-term climate trends, and are vital for the forewarning of impending floods and other meteorological events. ̽��ֱ��African continent has just 37 such stations.

Moreover, WMO data shows that more than 50% of the radar stations that do currently operate across Africa are unable to produce accurate enough data to predict weather patterns for the coming days or even hours.

̽��ֱ��research team call on the international community to boost funding for systems that mitigate risks to life from climate disasters. Currently, just US $0.47 of every $100 spent on global development aid goes towards disaster risk reduction of any kind.

“ ̽��ֱ��vast gaps in Africa’s disaster reduction systems are in danger of rendering other aid investments redundant,” said Dr Asaf Tzachor, co-lead author and research affiliate at Cambridge’s Centre for the Study of Existential Risk (CSER).

“For example, there is little point investing in smallholder farms if floods are simply going to wash away seeds, agrochemicals, and machinery.”

“We need to offer all Africans a chance to reduce their exposure to climate risks by fixing this glaring hydro-meteorological blind spot, before ever more lives are lost to the effects of global heating.”

To illustrate their point, the team compare two recent category 4 storms: Tropical Cyclone Idai hit southeast Africa in 2019, and Hurricane Ida swept the eastern US in 2021. Both had wind speeds of over 200km/hour.

US populations received evacuation alerts before Ida hit land, but the limited ‘hydromet’ capabilities meant Idai caught African nations by surprise. ̽��ֱ��US death toll was under a hundred, while over a thousand Africans lost their lives.

“Multilayered hydromet systems, including weather monitoring, forecasting and early warning, are taken for granted by the Global North, and have been for decades,” said co-lead author Dr Catherine Richards, also from CSER at the ̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge.

“Meanwhile, the most foundational layer on which the others depend is often missing, outmoded or malfunctioning across Africa – more so than any other global region.”

“Well-funded hydromet systems must become a priority to help at-risk populations mitigate and adapt to weather-related hazards as the effects of climate change take hold,” Richards said.

̽��ֱ��team outline a series of recommendations for plugging Africa’s weather-warning gap.

Firstly, identify the most at-risk areas. “Types of climate hazard vary wildly across the continent – from the cyclones in Madagascar to the protracted droughts of east Africa,” said Tzachor.

“ ̽��ֱ��need for more weather stations across Africa is undeniable, but this must go hand-in-hand with improved satellite monitoring and major training initiatives to increase the number of skilled African meteorologists.”

̽��ֱ��latest computational techniques must be adopted, say the authors, including automated AI approaches that combine weather data with social media activity to predict disaster dynamics.

Early warning systems need to be expanded, and provide clear directions to evacuate in local dialects. “Over 80% of Africans have access to a mobile network, so text messages could be a powerful way to deliver targeted warnings,” said Richards.

Finally, major investment will be vital – and pay dividends. “ ̽��ֱ��World Bank has estimated a $1.5 billion price tag for continent-wide hydromet systems, but it would save African countries from $13 billion in asset losses and $22 billion in livelihood losses annually,” said Tzachor. “A nearly nine-to-one return on investment is surely a no-brainer.”

* In Europe and the US, there are 636 radar stations for a total population of 1.1 billion and a landmass of 20 million km². In Africa, there are just 37 for a comparable population of 1.2 billion and landmass of 30 million km².

Investment in ‘hydromet systems’ using technologies from AI to SMS would provide a nine-to-one ROI in saved lives and assets across African nations.

Well-funded hydromet systems must become a priority to help at-risk populations mitigate and adapt to weather-related hazards as the effects of climate change take hold

Catherine Richards

Getty images

Drone shot in front of a spinning weather station, Free State, South Africa

̽��ֱ��text in this work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License. Images, including our videos, are Copyright © ̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge and licensors/contributors as identified. All rights reserved. We make our image and video content available in a number of ways – as here, on our main website under its Terms and conditions, and on a range of channels including social media that permit your use and sharing of our content under their respective Terms.

Yes

Cambridge experts on UK drought and climate change

lw355 — Tue, 16 Aug 2022 09:25:55 +0000

From pollinators to profits, food to fires, here's what Cambridge experts say about the impacts of water scarcity – and what it signals about our changing climate.

Opinion: How Davos power brokers can start tackling major environmental risks

Anonymous — Thu, 21 Jan 2016 16:48:05 +0000

̽��ֱ��World Economic Forum (WEF) published its annual Global Risks Report in the run up to its annual meeting in Davos. Food and water crises, energy price shocks, biodiversity loss and ecosystem collapse, extreme weather events and failure of climate change mitigation and adaptation, it said, are the biggest threats facing society.

Three of the top five global risks in terms of likelihood and three of the top five global risks in terms of impact have links to the environment. Of even greater concern, however, are the linkages between these systems, and the trade-offs associated with decisions in one area affecting another.

This growing recognition of environmental risks for business, and their interconnections, reflects what is emerging as “nexus” thinking in the natural and social sciences.

Those with long memories will recall that these issues have been high on the Davos agenda for much of the past decade and, therefore, discussed by the great and the good of corporate and political life. So why has significant business action not necessarily followed?

Making connections

Five years ago the WEF launched a report on the “Water-Energy-Food-Climate Change nexus”. It was a recognition that water concerns were closely linked to issues such as inequality, terrorism, famine, poverty and disease. This set the stage for business to consider a rounded approach to addressing the intimately interwoven threats from water scarcity, energy and food security and climate change. While there has been some progress, however, there is little evidence of a step change in attitudes and practices commensurate with the scale of the challenges.

Joined up thinking is needed. shutterstock.com

One reason for this inaction is what the Bank of England’s governor, Mark Carney, called the “tragedy of the horizon” in his speech to the insurance industry in September 2015.

̽��ֱ��impacts of many of these interconnected environmental risks fall outside the traditional decision-making horizons of most of those involved. Current decision makers have little incentive to fix the problem, even if they acknowledge and understand the risks.

This is illustrated in the latest Global Risks Report, which highlights an alarming finding:

… the relative absence of environmental risks and, more generally, of long-term issues among the top concerns of business leaders in their respective countries.

Myopic visions

Of more than 13,000 business executives in more than 140 economies whose views were sought in the WEF’s Executive Opinion Survey none identified environmental risks as among their top risks for doing business, both in terms of impact or likelihood.

Similarly, there is a stark contrast in the report’s identification of the top five global risks of highest concern over longer and shorter time frames. ̽��ֱ��four most important risks over a ten-year period are all environment-related (water, climate change, extreme weather events and food crises), but none of these feature in the 18-month time horizon.

Responding to potential environmental risks seems to always be just beyond the current decision horizon – important, but not requiring immediate action. We hear much about long-term planning, but it’s about time that environment risks were brought into the here and now.

To do that we need to understand why there has been a lacklustre response from the global community. One possibility is that key people and institutions – from business, academia and politics – are not yet efficiently working together to create solutions, despite meetings such as those that are taking place this week at Davos.

Drought is part of wider problems that affect business. EPA/Barbara Walton

Co-creating responses, now

̽��ֱ��Global Risks Report highlights the need to recognise joint interests and bring people together across shared priorities, but we still lack some tangible way to bring these common agendas together.

̽��ֱ��time is ripe for business leaders to shape the research that will enable them to better respond to major challenges across the nexus and empower them to act sooner rather than later. Instead of a reactive stance, responding when threats become immediate and unavoidable, there is an opportunity to shift to being proactive and collaborative.

As part of the Nexus2020 project the ̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge Institute for Sustainability Leadership recently convened academics and business leaders to collectively prioritise key issues that need to be addressed. We identified how to help companies manage their dependencies and impacts upon food, energy, water and the environment.

Those who are gathering at Davos need to seize the opportunity to overcome the tragedy of their short time horizons and work together to identify key questions and possible solutions. Otherwise, as Mark Carney has warned, by the time a problem becomes high on the agenda, it is often too late to respond. Moreover, these interconnected challenges will be harder and more costly to solve if action is delayed. ̽��ֱ��WEF presents a unique opportunity to co-create responses to the issues that are highlighted in this year’s Global Risks Report. Putting this off till the next meeting should not be an option.

Bhaskar Vira, Reader in Political Economy at the Department of Geography and Fellow of Fitzwilliam College; Director, ̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge Conservation Research Institute, ̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge; Gemma Cranston, Senior Programme Manager, Natural Capital Leaders Programme, Cambridge Institute for Sustainability Leadership (CISL), ̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge, and Jonathan Green, Postdoctoral research associate, ̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge

This article was originally published on ̽��ֱ��Conversation. Read the original article.

Find out more about the ̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge's activities at the World Economic Forum 2016 here.

Bhaskar Vira (Department of Geography), Gemma Cranston (Cambridge Institute for Sustainability Leadership) and Jonathan Green (Department of Geography) discuss what global powers need to do to tackle some of the biggest threats facing society.

̽��ֱ��text in this work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License. For image use please see separate credits above.

Yes

Words for mud and mountain, wind and wetland: answers on a postcard, please

amb206 — Wed, 01 Apr 2015 13:30:00 +0000

For more than a decade Dr Robert Macfarlane has collected endangered words. Not just any words but words for aspects of landscape – its contours, its feel underfoot, its weathers and moods – made fragile by the passing of time and the changing of practices. Lists of these words, organised into themed glossaries, form the backbone of his latest book Landmarks.

In the text that accompanies his word lists, Macfarlane travels from the peat bogs of the Isle of Lewis to the flatlands of the Cambridgeshire fens in search of hidden lexical treasure. Flying into Stornoway over the brown moorland expanses of Lewis, he overhears a couple joking that they have come to see nothing. Half an hour later, he’s talking to a Lewisian friend who is compiling a glossary of Gaelic peat-language: it encompasses 120 terms.

When Macfarlane wrote an article for the Guardian Review about Landmarks, he added a postscript inviting readers to send him postcards noting their words for landscape. He wasn’t sure whether people still sent postcards. They do. ̽��ֱ��cards reproduced here (with permission from senders) are just a few of the dozens that have found their way into Macfarlane’s pigeon hole at Emmanuel College.

View postcards on Flickr

A ‘dimple’, writes one correspondent, is Derbyshire for a pool in a wood or dell. ‘Geevy’, informs a card from Cornwall, is a mixture of mist and drizzle – “as in it’s a geevy old day”. A Radnorshire word for molehill is ‘unty-tump’. Written on the back of a postcard of the Cairngorms is: “eddish = 2nd crop of hay.” ‘Sprittin’ is “sprouting as in the hawthorn’s sprittin, spring’s on its way.”

John Birkett, who as a boy helped on farms in Cheshire, sent a handwritten list of more than 50 terms, subdivided and graded by x (possibly in use), xx (known to me as a lad) and xxx (known by my father in the 1920s). ‘Puthery’, meaning very humid, is “still used naturally by wife and I”. A cowshed is always a ‘shippon’: the word cowshed was never used as “it was considered very infra dig – fit only for those in the despised south”.

Each day brings more post. ̽��ֱ��latest is a letter from Mary West who lives in Westhorpe in Nottinghamshire. She writes to offer Macfarlane a large collection of words and sayings, recorded on index cards. She has been gathering words relating to the countryside for 40 years. “I’ve always collected things and I love words,” she says. “I’ve made around 25 scrap books about the lovely village where I live.”

Though unable to respond personally, Macfarlane would like to thank all those who sent not just words but poems and stories. They include writers and academics, a Jungian analyst, a ‘lollipop man’ and a lady in Lancashire aged 96. Their messages suggest how much their words for landscape mean to them. Recording and archiving their contributions will be a project in its own right.

Macfarlane would like more people to write to him with their word-gifts. Contributors should restrict their offerings to words that describe aspects of the landscapes of Britain and Ireland (names for places but no place-names, please), and could come from any of the many languages, dialects and sub-dialects of these islands, from Gaelic to Welsh, Shetlandic to Jérriais.

‘Dumberdash’ is an old Cheshire term for a short but violent storm. A ‘lumpenhole’ is a deep trench for fluid farmyard waste. The man who remembers these words is among the scores of people who have written to Dr Robert Macfarlane in response to his latest book, Landmarks.

A cowshed was always a shippon. Cowshed was considered very infra dig – fit only for those in the despised south.

Retired farmer, Cheshire

Ways to get involved and contribute more words

Send postcards to: Dr Robert Macfarlane, Emmanuel College, St Andrews Street, Cambridge CB2 3AP.

Send tweets using #livinglanguage

Leave comments in the section below.

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Yes

Study reveals economic impact of El Niño

fpjl2 — Fri, 11 Jul 2014 13:47:33 +0000

̽��ֱ��Paper, Fair weather or foul: the macroeconomic effects of El Niño, by Dr Kamiar Mohaddes of Cambridge's Faculty of Economics and Paul Cashin and Mehdi Raissi of the International Monetary Fund comes as the Australian Bureau of Meteorology says there is at least a 70% chance of an El Nino weather event developing in 2014.

El Niño is a band of above-average ocean surface temperatures that periodically develops off the Pacific coast of South America, and causes major climatological changes around the world. ̽��ֱ��last one was in 2009/2010.

El Niño can affect commodity prices and the macroeconomy of different countries. It can constrain the supply of rain-driven agricultural commodities; reduce agricultural output, construction, and services activities; create food-price and generalised inflation; and may trigger social unrest in commodity-dependent poor countries that primarily rely on imported food.

̽��ֱ��El Niño effect is found to be most severe in the Asia and Pacific region. For instance, it causes hot and dry summers in southeast Australia; increases the frequency and severity of bush fires; reduces wheat exports, and drives up global wheat prices. Moreover, El Niño conditions usually coincide with a period of weak monsoon and rising temperatures in India, which adversely affects India’s agricultural sector, increases domestic food prices, and adds to inflation and inflation expectations. Furthermore, mining equipment in Indonesia relies heavily on hydropower; with deficient rain and low river currents, less nickel (which is used to strengthen steel) can be produced by the world’s top exporter of nickel. For the United States, on the other hand, El Niño typically brings wet weather to California (benefiting crops such as limes, almonds and avocados), reducing fires in the west and bringing warmer winters in the Northeast, increased rainfall in the South, diminished tornadic activity in the Midwest, and a decrease in the number of hurricanes that hit the East coast.

̽��ֱ��Cambridge paper analyses the international macroeconomic transmission of El Niño weather shocks in a dynamic multi-country framework, taking into account the economic interlinkages and spillovers that exist between different regions.

Overall, the paper shows that while Australia, Chile, Indonesia, India, Japan, New Zealand and South Africa face a short-lived fall in economic activity in response to an El Niño shock, other countries may actually benefit from an El Niño weather shock (either directly or indirectly through positive spillovers from major trading partners), for instance, Argentina, Canada, Mexico and the United States. Furthermore, most countries in the sample experience short-run inflationary pressures following an El Niño shock, while global energy and non-fuel commodity prices increase.

̽��ֱ��researchers argue that, given these implications, macroeconomic policy formulation should take into consideration the likelihood and effects of El Niño episodes. Kamiar Mohaddes says: “Our research shows that the economic consequences of El Niño differs across countries – some lose and some benefit from such a weather shock. This is important for economic planning, particularly as such weather events are happening in cycles and their impact is sometimes very large. Countries with elevated inflation like India could be particularly susceptible to such episodes.”

El Niño has a significant impact on the world and local economies - and not always for the worst - and countries should plan ahead to mitigate its effects, according to a new Working Paper from the ̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge.

Weather effects are becoming more common and their impact is getting stronger and stronger

Kamiar Mohaddes

Jon Sullivan

El Niño waves crash into a pier

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Yes

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