The Weather Notebook: El Niño

El Niño
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Hi, I'm Bryan Yeaton and this is the Weather Notebook.

Remember El Niño, that meteorological superstar of yesteryear? Well, hold onto your hats because it may be visiting again. Commentator David Laskin has more.

Climatoon Archive - COAPS

Back in the winter of 1997-98, El Niño was everywhere - causing floods in California and drought in Australia, tamping down the Indian monsoon, suppressing Atlantic hurricanes. You couldn't open a newspaper or flick on the television without getting a face-full of El Niño -- it was the weather equivalent of Brittany Spears - "Oops, I did it again!" Well, brace yourself, because El Niño is about to make a comeback.

According to the latest data coming out of the tropical Pacific, the cold episode known as La Niña that has topped the charts since 1998 is fading out at last. Sea surface temperatures are starting to rise back into the normal range in parts of the ocean - and are even above normal in certain spots, a sure sign that El Niño is get its act together. The consensus among climatologists is that the summer and early fall will be near normal and then El Niño will be ready to come out of retirement by winter.

So, is this going to be a blockbuster like the one in 1997-98 - or something more quiet and folksy? Michael McPhaden is an oceanographer with the Pacific Marine Environmental Lab. McPhaden told me this: "The models are good on predicting whether we're going to have a warm or cold event. But not as good at the timing or magnitude."

That said, the advance buzz is that this El Niño is going to be a comparative dud - smaller, weaker, shorter than last time. But isn't that what they always say before a star makes a come-back?

That's commentator David Laskin of Seattle, Washington. The Weather Notebook is a production of the Mount Washington Observatory. The program is supported by the National Science Foundation.