Australia scientists urge caution on El Nino fears
Date: 27-Feb-02
Country: AUSTRALIA
Author: Michael Byrnes
Warnings are pouring in from Brazil to China and Indonesia that crops are threatened by floods and drought from a looming El Nino weather event, lingering half formed in the Pacific.
But in Australia, where El Nino brings drought, scientists and weather officials caution against "jumping the gun" with dire predictions of a repeat of the savage El Nino of 1997.
Recent downpours in Australian coastal areas highlight the difficulties in making an early call.
"The whole system's haywire, with autumn rain in the south like they've never seen before. But the north and the west is very ordinary (dry)," wheat, sheep and cattle farmer Rob Anderson told Reuters.
"I'd go with the 50/50 (view)," said Anderson, who runs a 6,000 acre spread near Moree in northwest New South Wales state. "West (to the fringe of the Australian Outback) they're getting pretty fidgety (about lack of rain). But (here) its more talk of a dry spell."
SEA TEMPERATURES RISE
Australian weather experts acknowledge a rapid warming of sea temperatures off the coast of Latin America in recent weeks, but said this was yet to develop into an El Nino.
"It's really going to take another couple of months before one can really say anything definitive," said Barrie Hunt, a chief research scientist with the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation (CSIRO).
In recent weeks concerns have been expressed about Brazil's sugarcane crop, Asia's rice supply, China's entire rural output, Vietnam's coffee, and that a replay might occur of the 1997 choking of much of Southeast Asia with smoke from forest fires.
"They're all jumping the gun a bit," Hunt said.
"In the next two months if that surface warming... starts spreading eastwards, one would have a lot more confidence that there's an El Nino coming."
The chances of an El Nino had risen from 30 percent six months ago, but at 50/50 at present the odds were still not definitive.
Grant Beard of the Australian Bureau of Meteorology said no El Nino existed at present.
"Any warming... has to extend over a large area of the ocean, not just along coastal sites. March to May is the critical time," Beard said.
"(But) the climate system remains primed (for El Nino), ready to go," he cautioned. "It just needs something to kick it off."
REGIONAL CONCERNS
El Nino, or "boy child" in Spanish, typically causes drought in eastern Australia and Southeast Asia and wet weather in western areas of the southern United States and South America. It is associated with warm sea temperatures off Latin America.
Australia's each-way bet contrasts with region-wide expressions of fear in the last week over a possible new El Nino.
Asia, source of 90 percent of the world's rice, was likely to see its harvest hit by El Nino drought this year, a United Nations official in Bangkok said last Friday.
In China, a government minister has warned the country was likely to be hit by widespread drought and seasonal floods.
And in Brazil, a leading sugar analysts said last week that yields may fall this year due to a possible El Nino weather pattern bringing heavy rain.