Scientists say summer 2014 may be hottest on record

Recent studies published by the 'PNAS' [Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences] journal claimed that the summer of 2014 will be the hottest on record, despite the wettest winter in a hundred years.

The studies explained that the weather is being linked to the El Niño pattern, which occurs when waters on the Pacific equator are irregularly warm, leading to disorderly changes in ocean and wind currents across the globe.

In this context, scientists in Germany said they can forecast El Niño trends a year in advance, up from the six months currently forecast.

The scientists at Armin Bunde of Justus Liebig University in Giessen, said that they have correctly predicted the weather over the past two years where no El Niño events were expected, but said that they are 17 percent certain that there will be one in 2014.

The researchers hoped that the forecasts could be used to help countries prepare more effectively for the potentially turbulent weather changes.

On the other hand, Climatologist Tim Barnett at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography in La Jolla, told Live Science that the methods the researchers used were outdated.

Other experts stated that this approach only analyses statistical patterns in temperature, rather than the physics of the seas or atmosphere, which they claim can always be found if you look hard enough.

El Niño means "little boy" or "the baby Jesus" in Spanish, and was named by South American fishermen who noticed that the ocean heats around Christmas.

Its counterpart, La Niña, or "little girl", occurs when equatorial Pacific waters are unusually cold. El Niño and La Niña are together known as the El Niño Southern Oscillation, or ENSO.