Word: nino
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...fact, this El Nino has showcased the progress climatologists have made over the past 15 years in understanding the earth's climate machine and the forces that drive it. In 1997, as soon as climate modelers spotted the area of warm water forming in the Pacific, they launched a coordinated effort to predict its effects on various regions of the world. Organized by the new International Research Institute for Climate Prediction--a joint venture of Columbia University's Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory, the Scripps Institution of Oceanography and NOAA--these efforts have, in the main, been on target...
...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...