Godzilla El Niño headed for California

Spanish for "little boy," an El Niño is far from little. It's a massive climate pattern, during which trade winds slacken, water temperatures increase, and the atmosphere grows both hotter and moister as a result. El Niños can affect the entire planet.

Some parts of the globe suffer extreme drought, while others endure abnormally heavy rainfall. Fish migrate to cooler waters. Whales pop up in weird places. In short, entire ecosystems are disturbed. And forecasters warn that an El Niño of epic proportions could strike the West Coast of the United States in either the late fall or early winter of 2015.

Godzilla El Niño

Upon hearing that California is set to receive unprecedented amounts of rainfall, you might wonder whether it's actually a good thing. Could the El Niño potentially end the state's historic drought?

The answer, though, is complicated. It has a lot to do with which parts of the state receive that rainfall.

Godzilla El Niño

California has about 1,500 reservoirs and 43 million acre-feet of reservoir storage space. Over three-quarters of it, however, are located north of Fresno. So, if the El Niño hits the northern part of the state, it could very well ease some of California's drought burden.

If, on the other hand, all that rainfall comes down in the southern part of the state, there will be no way to capture or store it.

Godzilla El Niño

The last time an El Niño this big touched down in California, countless homes were lost to erosion.

Here, one of those homes - a mansion in the Orange County suburb of Laguna Niguel - slips down a hillside turned mudslide, March 19, 1997.

California seals & sea lions

According to the NOAA, El Niño events generally have strong and detrimental effects on California's seal and sea lion populations.

As a result of the 1983 El Niño, for example, the number of northern fur seal pups born in 1983 declined 60 percent from the year before. What's more, based on a lack of resightings of tagged pups, it appears none of those born actually survived.

It took 6 years for California sea lion and 8 years for northern fur seal birth rates to recover.

Godzilla El Niño

In 2015, record numbers of starving baby sea lions have been washing ashore in California and the problem has shown no sign of abating. According to the New York Times, experts suspect that unusually warm waters are causing food to become more scarce, causing mother seals to leave their pups on their own while they hunt for food.

Left on their own, the pups cannot find food and become sick and emaciated, swimming to shore to prevent themselves from drowning. This distressed harbor seal pup lay stranded on a beach in Laguna Beach, California, in just that condition, March 30, 2015... not a good sign.

Godzilla El Niño

El Niños aren't good for coral reefs either. The 1997-1998 one killed an estimated 16 percent of the world's reef systems. And this August 15, 2015 photo, taken near Hawaii's Kaneohe Bay, shows that it's poised to happen again.

A massive "blob" of abnormally warm water is heating up the Pacific Ocean to the point that coral reefs in the waters off Hawaii are beginning to sicken and bleach.

Godzilla El Niño

These false-color images from NASA satellites show how the impending El Niño, set to hit California near the end of 2015, compares to the massive one that pounded California with rainfall back in 1997.

In both, warmer ocean water that normally stays in the western Pacific, shown as lighter orange, red and white areas, moves east along the equator toward the Americas. Forecasters say this El Nino is already the second strongest on record for this time of year and could be one of the most potent weather changers in 65 years.

Godzilla El Niño

Thanks to the impending El Niño, whales that are not normally seen along the West Coast of the U.S. are migrating there in search of food. So, in September 2015, residents of a small port town in Oregon, called Astoria, were shocked when Humpback Whales began suddenly splashing around near shore.

Godzilla El Niño

In addition to warm air out over the Pacific and uncharacteristic migratory patterns, the impending Godzilla El Niño has also spawned enormous hurricanes on the East Coast.

As a result, in October 2015, the state of South Carolina was inundated with a record 11 trillion gallons of rainfall. That's comparable to the amount of water it would take to fill 636 million pools. As of October 6, 2015, 15 people have died in the flooding there.

Godzilla El Niño

The excessive rain El Niños bring can also be deadly... and not just in the ways you'd imagine.

The mega-El Niño of 1997-1998 sent a wave of wet weather into north-eastern Kenya that sparked a surge in the mosquito-borne viral disease, Rift Valley Fever. In 1998, four hundred Kenyans died as a result of the epidemic.

Godzilla El Niño

More than just sliding down a hillside, the 1997-1998 El Niño caused numerous California homes to literally drift off into the Pacific Ocean.

Here, houses along a cliff in Pacifica, California, begin to slip off the edge into the Pacific, due to heavy mudslides and rain from the storms in Northern California, February 23, 2015.

Godzilla El Niño

Exemplifying the often polar weather patterns that an El Niño can produce simultaneously in different parts of the world, the 1997-1998 El Niño that caused extreme rainfall and flooding in California caused severe drought in the Philippines.

Here, corn wilts on a farm in a southern province of the Philippines, April 17, 1998. The El Niño weather phenomenon that year left seven corn and rice producing provinces in the southern Philippines under a state of calamity. Deprived of their livelihood by mother nature, affected farmers lost their regular source of income and, with limited government aid, many faced starvation.

Godzilla El Niño

Indonesia's national disaster management agency has already declared that the majority of the country's 34 provinces are experiencing the worst drought in the past five years, as a result of the 2015 El Nino weather phenomenon. This dry season forces villagers to walk extremely long distances to find clean water.

Here, a cow eats unhulled rice from a dried up ricefield in Makassar, Indonesia, September 21, 2015.

Godzilla El Niño

Honduras has also been hit by a major drought caused by the Godzilla El Niño, which has killed thousands of cattle and dried up crops.

According to a recent University of Cambridge paper, this sort of harvest and trade disruption will likely cause affected countries throughout the world to experience inflation. The ensuing agricultural and economic havoc may also fuel political conflict, adding insult to injury.

Godzilla El Niño

Historically, El Niños are also bad news for trees. All that wind and rain can topple towering trunks like they're lego pieces... and that's in a good year.

Emergency planners predict that in 2015, due to California's prolonged drought conditions, El Niño will likely fell more trees than ever before.

Godzilla El Niño

The midwest, however, may reap a silver lining in the overall El Niño cloud.

An April 2015 paper published in Nature Geoscience, a scientific journal,suggests that El Niños weaken the surface winds, which carry warm, moist air from the Gulf of Mexico over Texas and neighboring states, favoring storm formation. That means, 2015's upcoming Godzilla El Niño may very well reduce occurrences of tornadoes in the heartland.

Godzilla El Niño

After months of measured success convincing California residents to pare back their water use, state emergency officials now fear that the prospect of a Niño's heavy rains and flooding will dissuade Californians from continuing those conservation efforts.

Meanwhile, the El Niño's rapid release of stored heat could very well make 2015 the hottest year on record.