El Nino brings drought, floods and failed harvests
El Nino brings drought, floods and failed harvests
By Mira Gajevic
HAMBURG (DPA): Drought in Indonesia, record floods in Central and East Africa and a failed harvest in Latin America are all a result of the 1997/98 El Nino.
The most recent and most pronounced El Nino since records of this climatic phenomenon began caused economic damage around the world amounting to US$14 billion, according to the Munich Reinsurance company.
In Somalia alone more than 1,200 people died in the resulting flooding. Far more than 100,000 Argentineans had to be saved from floods in April, when an area twice the size of Belgium was under water.
The El Nino weather phenomenon appears in intervals of three to five years off the Pacific coast of South America for as yet unexplained reasons.
It begins with a change in the wind patterns over the eastern Pacific, which affects the currents. As a result the surface temperature of the water rises, which in turn affects evaporation, cloud formation and precipitation, mainly in the southern hemisphere.
Drought, floods and high winds are the results. El Nino is nothing new. U.S. researchers have recently discovered traces of Ice Age El Ninos in the sediment of Lake Huron in the North-West of the United States.
Peruvian fishermen gave the natural phenomenon its name more than 100 years ago. This combination of high and low pressure changes took place regularly around Christmas -- and El Nino (the boy) is named for the Christ Child -- but the gift brought by this phenomenon was less than welcome.
Fish stocks declined drastically for weeks, and sometimes for months.
According to meteorologists, however, the deviation from the normal weather pattern had never been as extreme as in the most recent El Nino.
"One theory is that this has to do with the greenhouse effect," climate researcher Mojib Latif of the Max Planck Institute for Meteorology in Hamburg says.
Temperatures in the east Pacific around the equator rose by four degrees to 29 degrees Celsius, at the peak as high as 32 degrees -- almost bathwater temperature. In the waters around the Galapagos Islands temperatures were in some places 10 degrees above the normal for the time of year.
As a result of El Nino the winter monsoon in Indonesia began late, leading to an abnormal dry period. This in turn provided favorable conditions for the devastating forest fires across Indonesia in the autumn of 1997.
The number of tropical cyclones in the east Pacific increased. The climatic phenomenon dissipated slowly earlier this year, water temperatures falling again to their normal levels, but the meteorologists are not yet ready to sound the all clear.
La Nina, the girl and the exact opposite of her brother, is waiting to take the stage. In this case temperatures in the Pacific would decline more than normal and the effects of El Nino would appear in reverse.
La Nina will influence weather patterns until May 1999, according to the predictions of the meteorologists, then it too will disappear from the climatic stage. Latif predicated as early as June that La Nina would lead to increased tropical cyclones.
The climate experts cannot predict exactly when the next El Nino will strike. Their quest for the origins of the unusually pronounced El Ninos is still in the early stages.
"One thing is certain. The El Ninos of recent years were not only more frequent but also stronger," Latif says.
He adds that the climate models predict continuing stronger and more frequent El Ninos if the carbon dioxide content of the atmosphere rises further.