Word: nino
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...north would be warmer and drier. That's just what happened: at one point this winter, it was snowing in Guadalajara, Mexico, while thermometers in Saskatchewan registered in the 50s. That doesn't mean the scientists are always right, of course. They can make broad-brush predictions of El Nino's effects without being able to forecast exactly what will happen in any given place. Some of the early prediction scenarios--no snow for the Olympic Winter Games at Nagano and monsoon failure in India--never materialized...
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...
...Nino works, scientists are now convinced, is that high pressure in the eastern Pacific sends trade winds blowing to the West. Because these winds push water before them like an invisible plow, the sea's surface actually measures about a foot and a half higher around Indonesia and Australia than it does off the coast of Peru. When the pressure drops and trade winds slacken, the water sloshes back downhill, to the east...
This eastward flow is central to the physics that drive El Nino, says Scripps' Nicholas Graham. The sloshing sends waves across the ocean like ripples in a pond. These waves, in turn, push down on the so-called thermocline, a layer of cooler water that normally mingles with the warmer water at the surface. As the thermocline sinks to greater depths, the mixing stops, temperatures at the sea's surface rise, and an El Nino begins...