Word: monsoonal
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...This year's monsoon season has brought the worst flooding to China's industrial and agricultural heartland since the 1930s. More than 2,000 people have been killed, and as many as 240 million others have been forced to evacuate their homes or found themselves clawing their way to safety aboard makeshift rafts. The flood damage is estimated to run at $24 billion, and 5.5 million homes have been destroyed. More importantly, the floods may have dashed the country's hopes of reaching its economic growth targets -- a deeply troubling scenario in an economy which has to maintain...
Indeed, this El Nino, like the others that preceded it, has generated as many questions as answers. Why, scientists wonder, does it sometimes torpedo the Indian monsoon and sometimes leave it alone? Is it typical, or very unusual, that as many as four El Ninos have struck over the past seven years? How remarkable is it that two record-breaking El Ninos have occurred within 15 years of each other...
...trying to unravel the detailed behavior of El Nino, Ralph and dozens of other researchers are furthering a scientific quest that began in the 1920s, when the British meteorologist Sir Gilbert Walker linked swings in atmospheric pressure over the Pacific to a disastrous failure of the Indian monsoon 50 years earlier. In the 1960s, UCLA meteorologist Jacob Bjerknes suggested that El Nino was governed by the same swings in atmospheric pressure...
...journal Science, a 150-year-old coral from the Seychelles Islands perfectly preserves both sets of fluctuations. One pattern tracks the El Nino fluctuations, swinging back and forth every few years; the other rises and falls on a 12-year schedule that closely follows India's official monsoon-rainfall index...
What stands out in the data is an unusually sharp rise in sea-surface temperatures in 1877, the very year that a strong El Nino coincided with the greatest failure of the monsoon in recent times. "The way I think of it," says Fairbanks, "is as an orchestra. Sometimes the monsoon and El Nino play together, and sometimes they play apart. But where's the conductor...