Prepare Umbrellas As The Rest of 2020 Might Become Winter With More Rain in S’pore


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If you’ve downloaded our app and come to our app regularly, you’d have known about this and stocked up on countless umbrellas in your house.

If not…why haven’t you downloaded our awesome app that we’ve been plugging in every single article and video? You can download here and rumours have it that your IQ will increase by 2 points if you’ve it in your phone.

Nonetheless, what happened was that back in July, we published an article, saying that more rain might be coming in September 2020 due to a girl called La Nina.

And well, it’s September now, and it seems like Nina is really on her way.

Prepare Umbrellas As The Rest of 2020 Might be More Rainy in S’pore

It might be difficult to predict if it’ll rain tomorrow, but predicting a season is easy.

That’s because people with PhDs would look at the monsoon: a bigly wind that sweeps across the earth. This “big” wind can “blow rain away”, which leads to little rain and therefore a hotter climate.

In fact, to some extent, this is why there are seasons in other countries, from winter to summer. That is, of course, so predictable that school holidays are based upon the seasons.

Technically speaking, over in Southeast Asia, the dry period is between June to August—which also explains why the haze usually comes around July.

Since 16 July 2020, weather.gov.sg, which is part of NEA, indicated that the El Nino Southern Oscillation (ENSO) monitoring system has changed from “Neutral” to “La Nina Watch” status.

Image: weather.gov.sg

You’d have noticed they told us to hint that something is going to happen in the next three months, and two months later, we got an update on 14 September with this:

Image: weather.gov.sg

If NEA is trying to impress us with their chim words, they’ve succeeded.


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So what does that mean?

The simplest explanation would be that during this dry season, there could be more rain than usual, which is not normal, but obviously a respite for us.

The simple but still a little complicated explanation is that based on some high-tech thingy to analyse stuff such as the Pacific sea surface temperatures (SSTs), low level winds, cloudiness (using outgoing longwave radiation), and sub-surface temperatures, NEA is now seeing whether La Nina is coming.

You see, ever since cockroaches live in Singapore, two climate phenomena could cause changes in temperature and rainfall, and it’s caused by the temperature of the sea.

With El Nino, it’ll raise the temperature. When it occurs, weatherman would call it the El Nino effect, though we just say it’s hot lah.

And it’s not something that occurs every year—it comes and go, and so does La Nina.

La Nina is the opposite of El Nino, which brings rain and cooler temperature. This is why NEA is “watching”—analysis of the environment shows that La Nina might be coming, which disrupts the usual dry season.

Lai Liao Lai Liao

Unless you’re Storm from X-Men, you can’t do much but to wait and see what happens next. The next best thing you can do is to analyse the data and predict if La Nina is indeed coming.

According to a weather scientist at the Singapore University of Social Sciences, Associate Professor Koh Tieh Yong, La Nina might come in September 2020.

And now, the Meteorological Service Singapore (MSS) of the National Environment Agency said, “La Nina-like conditions have been detected in the west Pacific. These include characteristic changes in the sea surface temperature, cloudiness, and winds in the tropical Pacific Ocean.”


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In other words, stock up on your umbrellas and buy some indoor drying washing detergent, because it’s going to be wet in the next few months.

However, of course, more observations are needed to declare that our little girl Nina is here in Singapore.

And if you’re wondering why they’ve such weird names instead of generic ones like “Hot Ocean” or “Cold Ocean”, it’s because El Nino, which means “the boy”, was named by Peruvian fishermen after the newborn Christ, which is originally known as El Nino de Navidad.

And La Nina, chosen as the “opposite” of El Nino, is Spanish for “the girl”.

So in July, we were waiting for the girl to come, and the girl is supposedly in the MRT based on her GPS location. Now, we can smell her perfume.

In the meantime, please excuse me as I check if I’ve at least three umbrellas at home.


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