Word: nino
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...Pacific Ocean known as El Ni¤o generates westerly winds that reach halfway around the globe to disrupt cloud formations that might otherwise form hurricanes. In fact, says Colorado State's Gray, a major reason there have been so few hurricanes in recent years is that El Nino has continued on a more or less nonstop basis...
...even though nobody has a handle on the underlying dynamics, the link between far-flung weather patterns and the North American hurricane season appears solid. Indeed, for the past 12 years, Gray has routinely used El Nino, Sahel rainfall and other factors to make impressively accurate predictions. Last October he forecast 12 major tropical storms for 1995, and in early August he upped the number to 16, just five storms shy of the record set in 1933 and more than double the number in 1994. "People thought we'd gone crazy," says Gray. "Now it appears we probably undershot...
Thus began a remarkable period of undersea discovery that transformed biology, geology and oceanography. Scientists have started to understand, for example, how year-to-year changes in wind patterns and ocean currents that lead to phenomena like the Pacific's El Nino can not only devastate populations of commercially valuable fish but also trigger dramatic shifts in weather patterns. Oceanic fluctuations over much longer time scales, combined with major currents like the Gulf Stream, may start (and bring to an end) planet-wide climatic changes like the Ice Ages...
...NINO World's only household-name weather pattern returns; this time, no more Senor Nice...
Translating directly from Spanish, he paints the mighty tropical storm, El Nino, into a small boy, hudding, "like us,/ gnawing his knees...