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El Nino seen fading but jury still out: experts
2007-01-16
The current El Nino weather anomaly appears to be fading, and its impact has been muted in North America with normal weather conditions seen this year over the corn and soybean growing region of the Midwest, climate scientists said. The scientific jury on the issue remains out, however, and more time is needed to determine if it is in fact losing steam, they added. The El Nino phenomenon warms sea surface temperatures in the Pacific Ocean and can disrupt weather patterns across the Western Hemisphere to the west coast of Africa. "There are indications that it is fading fast. There are model simulations which are pointing to that," said Louis Uccellini, director of the National Centers for Environment Prediction, which is part of the U.S. government's National Oceanic & Atmospheric Administration. He said there was no consensus on this yet and that there was much ongoing discussion among scientists. "I think we need another month of model simulations before we can say that this thing will really decrease as rapidly as the current models are now saying, or whether this will extend into the spring as was originally forecast," he told Reuters on the sidelines of the annual meeting of the American Meteorological Society in San Antonio, Texas. The last severe El Nino, in 1997-98, sparked widespread forest fires in Asia, killed more than 2,000 people and caused property damage worth an estimated $33 billion. Uccellini said the current El Nino developed quite rapidly last year in the Northern Hemisphere spring and into the summer, but the patterns were unusual. "The heavy precipitation has been further north than what was expected and it's drier in the California area (than was expected)," he said. "I would say that we will be looking at more normal kinds of conditions rather than drier ones over the (U.S.) Midwest (this year)," he said. Bill Patzert of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California, said in North America it was a "flip-flop" of the standard El Nino. "It is behaving very non-El Nino-like ... In the typical El Nino, the northern tier of the United States tends to be relatively mild and dry, whereas the southern tier of the United States from L.A. to Atlanta tends to be unusually wet," he said. "Now in L.A. we are on track for the driest winter in 100 years -- on the other hand Seattle has had record-breaking rainfall. So it's a flip-flop," he said. He also said that it seemed to be losing force. "We are in the tail end of the El Nino now -- it's definitely on the fade." El Nino means "little boy" in Spanish. The pattern was named after the Christ child when it was first noticed by Latin American anchovy fishermen in the 19th century because it tends to peak around Christmas time.
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