The Child's Tantrum: El Nino. The Origin of the El Nino-Southern Oscillation
In 1997, a child's tantrums caught the world's attention. These tantrums took the form not of crying and foot stamping, but of droughts and floods. Obviously, this was no ordinary child. It was, in fact, The Child, or El Nino, as it was, named in the late 1800s by South American observers, who noted that its timing coincided with the Christmas holiday. El Nino is a reversal in sea surface temperature (SST) distributions that occurs once every few years in the tropical Pacific. When it coincides with a cyclical shift in air pressure, known as the Southern Oscillation, normal weather patterns are drastically altered. The combined phenomenon is known as El Nino-Southern Oscillation (ENSO). Although ENSO is a regular phenomenon, it was unusually strong in 1997. It produced heavy rainfall and floods in California and bestowed spring-like temperatures on the Midwest during the winter. These drastic changes in normal weather patterns captured the public imagination, from news reports to jokes on late-night talk shows. Naturally, people wanted to. know as much, about El Nino as possible. Fortunately, scientists had at their disposal new satellites and ocean sensors that provided an unprecedented level of information. Consequently, not only was the 1997 ENSO the strongest in recent memory, but it was also the most thoroughly studied. Prominent groups such as the NASA Seasonalto-Interannual Prediction Project (NSIPP) combined numerous aspects of climate modeling into a single, predictive endeavor.