Word: weathers
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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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...
...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...
External forces may also help explain why El Nino has a different impact on the weather from one cycle to the next. Recently, for example, Ed Cook of Lamont-Doherty and Julie Cole of the University of Colorado used tree rings from hundreds of sites to see how El Nino affected North America in the past. Before 1920, they found, El Nino appears to have affected a much larger region of the U.S. than it does today, channeling winter rain and snow all the way up into the Great Lakes and Great Plains. Afterward, however, its sphere of influence retreated...