Word: nino
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Their interest is twofold. First they want to better understand El Nino itself--what makes it work, what makes it recur, how it affects human activities. To that end, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) announced last week that it is setting aside $2.1 million to study the impact of the latest flurry of El Nino-related storms...
Like global warming, El Nino--or rather, the climate cycle that produces El Nino--does not generate weather per se: rather it alters the context in which weather takes place. The distinction here is a critical one. "Climate," as social scientist Michael Glantz, formerly of the National Center for Atmospheric Research, likes to say, "is what you expect. Weather is what...
...scientists who make it their business to track the world's weather, however, have appreciated it all along. This El Nino may be the most studied weather phenomenon of all time. For months, and in some cases years, meteorologists have been poring over weather maps, running supercomputer simulations, studying coral reefs, tree rings and glacial ice--all to try to understand the dynamics of a pool of warm water in the Pacific...
...same time, El Nino gives scientists a rare chance to study a phenomenon that transcends the short-term weather forecasts that are the bread and butter of meteorologists. In many ways, El Nino may be a dry run for the kind of large-scale weather effects some scientists predict will accompany the climate changes caused by global warming...
Sometimes there can be a wide gulf between the two. In Australia, for example, El Nino caused extremely dry conditions that for a while last year had farmers contemplating suicide. But as it turns out, some rain did fall--just in time to rescue the wheat harvest from disaster. Does that mean the drought predictions were wrong? Not at all, says Nicholas Graham, a climate modeler at the University of California at San Diego's Scripps Institution of Oceanography. Think of what El Nino does as the equivalent of rigging a roulette wheel so that it comes up black...