Kelembapan udara Semenanjung Malaysia menurun lagi

Udara kering dari Indo-China mula memasuki Semenanjung Malaysia ketika ini. Fenomena yang jarang berlaku ini belum diketahui impaknya bagaimana. Adalah diharapkan agar hujan tetap turun untuk mengisi empangan untuk bekalan air paip. Tetapi cuaca kering ini tidak menggalakkan pertumbuhan awan. Akibatnya kemarau mungkin berpanjangan untuk beberapa ketika lagi. 

Ini mungkin berkaitan dengan fenomena El-Nino yang diramal menjadikan 2014 sebagai tahun paling panas dalam rekod moden.

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El Niño may make 2014 the hottest year on record

Hold onto your ice lollies. Long-term weather forecasts are suggesting 2014 might be the hottest year since records began. That's because climate bad-boy El Niño seems to be getting ready to spew heat into the atmosphere.

An El Niño occurs when warm water buried below the surface of the Pacific rises up and spreads along the equator towards America. For nine months or more it brings rain and flooding to areas around Peru and Ecuador, and drought and fires to Indonesia and Australia. It is part of a cycle called the El Niño-Southern Oscillation.

It is notoriously hard to make a prediction before the "spring barrier" as to whether there will be an El Niño in a given year. "The El Niño-Southern Oscillation cycle more or less reboots around April-May-June each calendar year," says Scott Power from the Bureau of Meteorology in Melbourne, Australia.

The problem is that there is so much background variability in the atmosphere and ocean that it is hard to see any signal amidst the noise, says Wenju Caifrom the CSIRO, Australia's national research agency in Melbourne. "Even if there is a developing El Niño, it is hard to predict."

Links in the air

But now a model aimed specifically at predicting El Niño seems to be able to sift through the noise by examining a previously-unexplored feature of Pacific weather.

Previous predictions have relied on full climate models. Rather than using this traditional approach, Armin Bunde of Justus Liebig University in Giessen, Germany, and his colleagues looked at the strength of the link between air temperature over the equator and air temperature in the rest of the Pacific. The records showed that, in the year before each El Niño, the two regions became more closely linked, meaning their temperatures became more similar than at other times.

BACAAN LANJUT : NEWSCIENTIST