Australian scientists see likely El Nino in 2002
Date: 08-Feb-02
Country: AUSTRALIA
Author: Michael Byrnes
Complex computer models in Australia, the United States and Britain have in the last month or so swung to predict an awakening of the weather condition which causes droughts and floods, fires and famine.
"Observations have switched to a positive temperature anomaly from November/December. That's a substantial change in a fairly short time," said Barrie Hunt, a Chief Research Scientist with Australia's Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation (CSIRO).
"El Nino may be emerging."
Diverse models fast-tracked globally in recent years are reaching the same prediction from sea temperature and atmospheric readings taken by a growing network of oceanic buoys and polar orbiting satellites.
Australia's CSIRO, one of the leading organisations in the world in this work, yesterday joined the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) to predict a developing El Nino.
NOAA said earlier this week it was likely that an El Nino weather system would develop in the tropical Pacific in the next three months, and that sea temperatures would warm off the coast of Equador and Peru over the next few weeks.
Effects of the El Nino weather phenomenon, which brings cool waters to the western Pacific, include heavy rain and floods in the southern United States and Peru, and drought and forest fires in the Western Pacific, eastern Australia and Southeast Asia.
A 1997 El Nino caused famine in Papua New Guinea villages.
EARLY PREDICTIONS
Predictions of a likely 2002 El Nino have emerged surprisingly early in the year, with conditions normally not clear until the Australian autumn between March and May.
The Australian Bureau of Meteorology believed it was "still a bit too early to say" if an El Nino was on the way, spokesman Grant Beard told Reuters yesterday.
"(However) the climate is primed for an El Nino event to occur given the right sets of conditions," he said.
Hunt noted that El Nino conditions had been "sloshing around" in the Pacific for two years. "This time it looks like we have the incipient signs of an El Nino," he said.
If a 2002 Pacific El Nino develops, it will become full-blown around Christmas, with deleterious effects on Australia's rainfall beginning to be seen in the country's winter.
"The next months should give a good indication," Hunt said.
The CSIRO, the Australian weather bureau and NOAA all agree that if El Nino takes hold, its strength, its rainfall effects and its duration would all be wild cards for a large part of the world's weather in 2002 - and possibly into 2003.
Studies of Australian rainfall patterns over 23 past El Nino events showed widespread variations, Beard said.
The powerful El Nino of 1997 largely spared Australia but choked Southeast Asia for weeks with forest fires in Indonesia.