El Niņo's Wicked Weather

Reported March 2007

PASADENA, Calif. (Ivanhoe Broadcast News) -- Drenching rain ... Deadly tornadoes ... Wicked ice storms. 1998's El Niņo was a huge force. So when El Niņo surfaced again this winter, NASA climatologists and oceanographers jumped on his trail.

From 1,300 kilometers in space, satellite Jason tracks El Niņo's return to the tropical Pacific, sending images every 10 days. El Niņo develops when easterly trade winds that usually push warmer-than-normal sea waters west weaken, allowing warm water to spread east towards the Americas -- supplying more moisture and energy to storms in the United States.

"We did have severe droughts and fires in the western Pacific, but the impacts never really developed over the Americas," Bill Patzert, Ph.D., a climatologist at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif., tells Ivanhoe.

Pasadena Fire Chief Dennis Downs was counting on El Niņo rains to reverse California's record dry spell. "There's no chance to catch up," he says. "So what you're looking at now is a tinder box just waiting to go up."

And that means firefighters can expect a busy year.

Across town, Dr. Patzert tracks a rapidly fading El Niņo. "Sometimes these El Niņos are pretty small and the impacts are really marginal," he says. "That's really what we saw this winter." Still, climatologists keep their eyes on the Pacific. The minute you call El Niņo an el "no-show," he'll prove you wrong.

El Niņo typically lasts nine to 12 months and peaks from December to April. We can expect an El Niņo every two to seven years.

The American Meteorological Society contributed to the information contained in the TV portion of this report.

Click here to Go Inside This Science or contact:

William Patzert, Ph.D.
Jet Propulsion Laboratory
(818) 354-5395

American Meteorological Society
Boston, MA 02108-3693
(617) 227-2425
http://www.ametsoc.org

El Niņo has popped up again this winter, but spotting him and predicting what he'll do are two different things.

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