Weather Whys; El Nino

This is weather-wise. Over the past decade, a phenomenon known as El Niño has received a lot of attention both in the scientific community and in the world at large. El Niño is an abnormal warming of the top layers of the ocean, which occurs off the coast of Peru, and it's been known to reduce the Peruvian and Chovicatch catastrophically. Now unless you like anchovies on your pizza, you may not be very concerned so far. But El Niño's effect reaches much farther than the pizzeria. Many scientists suspect that a strong El Niño may have a marked effect on the weather of the United States. They cite, for instance, the winter of 1982-83, when an exceptionally strong El Niño occurred. During that season, the west coast of the United States was pounded with storm after storm moving in from the Pacific Ocean, and El Niño was the suspected cause. Many of the storms rode the upper-level winds into the Gulf Coastal States, where they dumped

even more heavy rain. At the same time, residents of the Northeastern United States were enjoying an unusually mild winter. El Niño is really just an extension of a normal Pacific weather pattern. Almost every year, right around Christmas, warm currents move into the waters off the coasts of Peru and Ecuador. In fact, the name El Niño is Spanish for the child, referring in this case to the infant Jesus. Normally, the waters stay warm for a few weeks, maybe even a month. But sometimes the warmth persists for several months. That's when it can significantly affect the weather of the United States, as well as that of other nations around the Pacific Rim. Otherwise is produced with the assistance of the Cooperative Institute for Mesoscale Meteorological Studies, the Oklahoma Climateological Survey, and the School of Meteorology, all at the University of Oklahoma. For weather-wise, I'm Drew Barlow.