WASHINGTON - A brewing “Super” El Nino cycle is poised to unleash heat waves, floods and drought worldwide, with the effects amplified by long term human-caused climate change.

But what if it was possible to interrupt and effectively “switch off” the Pacific Ocean heating phenomenon as it starts to form?

That’s the premise of a new Science Advances study published on July 8, which uses computer models to show that artificially brightening clouds over the Pacific, when timed right, could neutralise the influential weather pattern and blunt its worst impacts.

While previous research on so-called geo-engineering has focused on cooling the planet as a whole, the new paper instead proposes more targeted interventions.

“These shorter timescales of interventions could be a very powerful way that geoengineering enters this portfolio of responses to climate change,” lead author Jessica Wan, a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Chicago, told AFP.

Prior research had shown that the “Black Summer” bushfires that scorched Australia in 2019-2020 played a key role in creating a multi-year La Nina, the cool phase of the El Nino-Southern Oscillation cycle.

As smoke particles entered the clouds, they set off chain reactions that actually made the clouds brighter, bouncing more of the Sun’s energy back to space.

Motivated by this “natural experiment,” Wan and her colleagues wondered whether solar geo-engineering could achieve a similar effect.

They used a powerful forecasting model to gauge what impact artificial marine cloud brightening over a vast rectangular zone in the equatorial Pacific would have had on the 1997-1998 and 2015-2016 El Nino events.

This could theoretically be achieved by using ships fitted with nozzles that spray sea salt into the lower atmosphere.