Time to Get in Training for El Nino’s Monster Storms

I brought my umbrella to work this week--which is no mean feat, because I usually can’t find it. Or, if I do happen to track it down, my timing is always off: If it rains when I’m at work, the umbrella will undoubtedly be at home. If it’s raining in the morning when I leave for work, the umbrella will undoubtedly have been left at the office the night before. When my karma is really working, I’ll bring the umbrella to work but leave it in the car. Inevitably at day’s end, it will be raining torrentially as I make the dash from the office to the parking lot.

What I’m trying to say is that in years past, the rain, my umbrella and me have seldom been in the same place at the same time.

In general, my 11-year California track record with rain is not good. I remember

one November day a few years ago, standing at the back door of the office with a colleague as we watched the rain pelt the bean field behind us. That’s a beautiful sight, I said. I really miss those kinds of rains, I said, recalling my Midwestern heritage. I wish it would rain all day, I said. And it did rain all day, a marvel that lost some luster when I left the office hours later and discovered my car’s sun roof had been open all day long.

Can’t let that happen this year. Must be smarter about the rain. I must begin now to get in the routine: Leave for work with umbrella in hand. Carry umbrella from car into office. Close sun roof. Leave office with umbrella.

This will be the winter of El Nino, the meekest name ever conceived for a big troublemaker. If they wanted us to be wary, you’d have thought they’d have named it El Diablo or El Bruto. Instead, they call it El Nino, “the child,” and tell us to beware.

The word is spreading. A recent vacation to the Rocky Mountain West convinced me. People in Denver are blaming their abnormally rainy summer on El Nino. I drove the last muscle-tightening 30 miles one night into the high desert town of Cedar City, Utah, in the midst of a downpour, and a waitress told me it hardly ever rained like that. “It’s El Nino,” she said, reverentially.

One man who nods his head knowingly at all this is Wheeler North, a professor emeritus of environmental science at Caltech. North retired in 1992 but still goes in every day to the Kerckhoff Marine Laboratory near his home in Corona del Mar to measure seawater temperature. That temperature, along with a rise in sea level, will tell scientists when El Nino has arrived.

Specializing in the ecology of kelp and with a career at the marine laboratory spanning 34 years, North anticipates El Nino like someone would the flu. El Ninos are notoriously bad on kelp beds, among other things.

There’s little doubt that El Nino is on the way, North said.

“It’s a natural phenomenon that’s going to occur and the magnitude is probably going to be large,” he said. “I can’t tell you whether it will happen in 1997 or early ‘98, but I have no reservations that we’ll feel the effects of it. We’ve had several El Ninos since 1982 but they’ve been small ones. It’s an old foe that’s coming back, but this time it’s the granddaddy of them all, or the mother of them all, whatever you want to call it.”

It’s not that it’ll rain every single day, North said. “It’s more a case that the ones we get will be more ferocious.”

North, 75, remembers the last big El Nino, the one that made itself felt in Southern California in the winter of 1982-83. “It actually arrived around July of that year,” he said.

Locally, however, the climatic effects are confined to winter. The El Nino that winter had been predicted well in advance, North noted. “I think the predictions are fairly reliable. From what I’ve read in the newspaper and Science magazine, this one is the biggest one of the century, so it’ll undoubtedly make it up here with all the attendant things that go with it.”

Waterfront properties will face the prospect of high water levels (the 1982-83 El Nino produced foot-high increases during high-tide storms, he said). Inland residents can expect lots of rain, probably flooding, and high winds.

I told North he sounded like the Grim Reaper. He laughed but conceded the point. “An El Nino isn’t good news,” he said.

Someone needs to tell my boss. He happened to be at the door one day when I walked in with my umbrella. “It’s not going to rain today,” he said, a little too smugly.

Maybe not today. Maybe not tomorrow. . . .

Dana Parsons’ column appears Wednesday, Friday and Sunday. Readers may reach Parsons by calling (714) 966-7821, by writing to him at The Times Orange County Edition, 1375 Sunflower Ave., Costa Mesa, CA 92626, or by e-mail at dana.parsons@latimes.com.