Signs Of El Nino's Rebirth
U.S. government weather experts said on Thursday a warming trend in the Pacific Ocean last month provided more evidence of an imminent El Nino, but the intensity of the weather phenomenon, blamed for searing droughts and devastating floods, remained unclear.
The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration said it was still too early to accurately forecast what weather conditions El Nino will bring to the United States.
El Nino is an abnormal warming of waters in the eastern Pacific Ocean. Sometimes an unusual cooling of the ocean waters, called La Nina, occurs between El Ninos. Last seen in 1997-98, El Nino was blamed for crop-destroying droughts in Australia, the Philippines and Indonesia and deadly floods in Peru and Ecuador. It caused $34 billion in damage worldwide, displaced 6 million people and was blamed for 24,000 deaths, NOAA said.
Peruvian fishermen named the phenomenon El Nino - Spanish for little boy - after the Baby Jesus because they usually would notice the effect on their fishing around Christmastime.
In January, NOAA predicted for the first time that an El Nino event would likely occur this spring.
"It's still too early to determine the potential strength of this El Nino...but it is likely these warming conditions in the tropical Pacific will continue until early 2003," said NOAA Administrator Conrad Lautenbacher.
NOAA said it issued the forecast after observing a nascent warming trend in the Pacific Ocean grow stronger. Ocean surface temperatures warmed 2 degrees Celsius near the South American coast last month.
The warming was accompanied by increased rainfall over that area, the agency said in its monthly El Nino report.
The government agency said the warmer ocean temperatures have already impacted Peru's fishing industry with anchovies being replaced with tropical species.
But, Peru's government this week said its fishing industry would be safe from El Nino damages this year.
Typical El Nino impacts on the United States include drier-than-normal monsoon season conditions in the Southwest, drier-than-normal fall and winter in the Pacific Northwest, wetter-than-normal winter in the Gulf Coast states from Louisiana to Florida, warmer-than-normal late fall and winter in the northern Great Plains and the upper Midwest, a reduction in the number of tropical storms in the Atlantic and an increase in the number of East Coast winter storms.
The weather anomaly also suppresses the total number of tropical systems during hurricane season.
Some weather experts said there was not enough evidence yet to declare a return of El Nino outright.
"Right now it's a judgment call because we really don't know yet whether El Nino is back or not," said Chet Ropelewski, director of the International Research Institute for Climate
Prediction. "But the odds are with (NOAA)."
The institute predicts the chances of an El Nino this year at 50 percent to 60 percent, compared to about a 25 percent chance for any given year.