Word: nino
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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...
These subsurface waves explain more than the origin and propagation of El Ninos. They also explain how El Ninos end. When the waves first hit the South American coast, some reflect back, like sound bouncing off a wall. When the reflected waves reach Asia, they rebound again. But this double bounce inverts their effect: instead of depressing the thermocline, these twice-reflected waves now lift it up. Cool water dilutes the warmer liquid at the surface, causing a temperature drop in the eastern Pacific known, aptly enough, as La Nina. Thus, observes Ants Leetmaa, director of the National Climate Prediction...
...Nina can bring its own set of weather headaches: a drier, hotter southern tier and a wetter, colder north. "Like a pendulum that goes back and forth, El Nino is one side of the extreme and La Nina is the other," says Scripps' Lisa Goddard. Although the magnitude of an El Nino doesn't necessarily determine the size of the subsequent La Nina, some climatologists are already saying that if you think this El Nino was bad, wait until you see his sister...
...long this boom-and-bust cycle has been operating, no one really knows. Finding out might seem to be a hopeless task, considering that the phenomenon was discovered only about a century ago by Peruvian fishermen. (It was they who called it El Nino, the Spanish name for the Christ child whose December birthday marks its peak.) But last fall, Columbia University oceanographer Richard Fairbanks was floating in the equatorial Pacific gathering data that could tell researchers about El Ninos going back thousands of years. Working aboard the research vessel Moana Wave, Fairbanks spent weeks at El Nino's very...
...water temperatures rise, these small creatures incorporate less strontium into their skeletons than they do under cooler conditions. Their oxygen content, meanwhile, records salinity swings, which in turn can be used to estimate rainfall. And warm temperatures and heavy rainfall--here, at least--are the telltale markers of El Nino...