El Nino May Bring More Hype Than Rain

As you squirrel away flashlight batteries for a long, warm, wet El Nino winter, take comfort in these thoughts:

* Maybe the rains won’t come.

* If they do, things probably will be a whole lot worse in Arizona.

* El Nino doesn’t necessarily portend storms of biblical portions. It can just mean the skies will pour forth like people vote in Chicago--early and often.

* We’ve already been experiencing little El Ninos--should we call them Los Ninitos?--for the past few winters.

So says Caltech professor Andrew Ingersoll, who spoke this weekend during a workshop on Southern California’s history and environment. The three-day gathering at Cal State Northridge ended Saturday.

“It’s all probabilities,” Ingersoll said during an interview. “El Nino changes the odds by a factor of two. It doesn’t make it a dead-sure thing we’re going to get heavy rain.”

He called the odds closer to a 75% chance of increased rainfall than the widely reported apocalyptic predictions. His own research, he said, shows that El Nino has been knocking on California’s door for the past few winters.

“The El Ninos have been misbehaving,” Ingersoll said. “We’ve been getting a little one every year for the last five years. They usually come every three to six years, with an average of about every four years. But for some reason, they’ve been popping up every year.”

Ingersoll, who holds a doctoral degree in atmospheric science, spends most of his time researching and teaching about other planets. He is not a meteorologist. But, he said, his mission at the workshop was to put the El Nino phenomenon into historical perspective.

“Since I was talking to historians and environmental people and not to meteorologists, I focused on the effects and what does it really mean,” Ingersoll said.

Arizona, he said, can expect the most rainfall from an El Nino condition, Ingersoll said. “For some reason, Arizona is more sensitive to it than we are.”

On the other side of the Pacific Ocean, meanwhile, the monsoon season will probably be a bust. And Australia and Egypt could see drought years, Ingersoll predicted.

Here, he said, “if you live on the sand, you should take precautions everywhere.” Inlanders, he added, “should just be a little careful this winter.”

And, if we get an El Nino winter, skiers are advised to head north. The condition brings warm rains here from Hawaii rather than the usual, cold Gulf of Alaska storms that whiten the peaks.

As for the hype, Ingersoll isn’t that worried.

“The odds of our getting more total rain are higher,” he said. “The odds of getting more intense storms are less clear. In some of the data, I found that the really big storms are not connected to El Ninos. They just came out of the blue and blasted us.”