El Nino expected to hit hard this winter and spring

World prepares for worst predicted El Nino in 15 years, which left $1.5 billion in U.S. damages

The Washington Post

There's trouble in the air. Specifically, in the air off the west coast of the Americas, where the sea surface has been heated to abnormal extremes by an ominous, intermittent flood of hot water called El Nino.

The last time conditions looked like this was when the strongest, most destructive El Nino on record struck in 1982-83. By the time that event subsided, some 2,000 people had died in flooding, mud slides, droughts, fires and sundry related calamities, hundreds of thousands were forced out of their homes, and economic losses topped $8 billion worldwide - $1.5 billion in the United States.

This year's version promises to approach or even equal 1982-83, which climate researcher James O'Brien of Florida State University's Center for Ocean-Atmospheric Prediction Studies (COAPS) calls "the mother of all Los Ninos." Already, El Nino has be

AP PHOTO Storm-generated winds batter the Malibu, Calf. coastline in January 1993, as a series of winter winds similar in ferocity to the coming 'El Nino' wind storms swept across California.

gun to have dramatic effects in some parts of the world and the U.N.-sponsored World Climate Research Programme warns it "could be the climatic event of the century."

"This one leapt out of the starting blocks," said Ants Leetmaa, director of the National Weather Service's Climate Prediction Center. "By this summer it was ahead of all the others we've seen" since 1950 in terms of early and strong sea-surface warming.

Unlike 1982-83, the world has advance warning this time and the opportunity to protect itself. The threat of a repeat has prompted a rush of scientific symposiums, congressional hearings and anxious regional palavers from Zimbabwe to Australia to flood-leery California, where a federal-state "El Nino summit" has been scheduled for next month in Los Angeles.

"We're preparing for the worst, but hoping for the best," said Douglas P. Wheeler, California's secretary for resources.

In addition, the likely ferocity of this year's event has scientists wondering whether the frequency and intensity of El Nino episodes is suddenly on the rise - and what that might mean.

El Nino, the Spanish term for the Christ child, got its deceptively soothing name decades ago because it tended to show up around Christmas in Peru every three to seven years. It is part of a larger natural pattern, the combined El Nino-Southern Oscillation, causing a vast, periodic reversal of conditions in the equatorial Pacific that unsettles weather patterns worldwide.

El Nino's impact is usually greatest in the winter and lasts for several months, though sometimes it can continue into the spring.

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