El Nino Spurs Global Flood of Preparation

From Washington to Johannesburg, emergency planners and scientists are huddling to confront the newest global nemesis. Stock traders have triggered a small boom in futures options as they try to second-guess the phenomenon’s effect on food prices, exports and interest rates.

The phenomenon is El Nino, now shaping up along the equator as potentially the most destructive weather pattern in a century. For the first time, the National Weather Service successfully predicted its start and unusual scope, giving emergency planners almost six months’ warning of the disruptive Pacific Ocean current.

But successfully forecasting the onset of El Nino is far easier than predicting its precise effect on local weather in the months to come, experts say.

In the rush to prepare, politicians and the public have embraced the most extreme vision of the coming El Nino winter--a season of what may be devastating storms, record rainfall, floods, and crushing surf. Climate experts, although proud of forecasting the El Nino so far in advance, nonetheless are apprehensive about increasingly dire predictions of its consequences worldwide.

“When we have had a blizzard, when we have had a drought, when we have had a flood, people used to blame global warming. This year, you are going to hear people blame El Nino for everything,” said John Christy, an atmosphere expert at the University of Alabama in Huntsville who is tracking El Nino’s effect on global temperatures by satellite.

Economic and Political Climate Feeling Impact

So far, the most far-reaching impact of this El Nino may be on the world’s political and economic climate, in what some researchers suggest is as much an experiment in the politics of preparedness as an exercise in long-range weather prediction.

In Cuba, agriculture officials ordered an early start to the annual sugar harvest to avoid the predicted damaging storms, while officials in Peru last week borrowed $250 million from the World Bank to offset the weather’s anticipated effects on the national economy. Ecuador borrowed $180 million.

In Washington, congressional leaders from both sides of the aisle want to boost budgets dramatically for El Nino research and mitigation efforts. And in Los Angeles, where officials expect to convene an emergency “summit meeting” on the El Nino phenomenon next month, research scientists find themselves part of the advertising by roofing companies trying to cash in on the predictions of unusually severe winter storms.

“If nothing really bad happens this year, it will be a bad scene for a lot of climate scientists,” Christy said.

But the data streaming from several satellites monitoring the Pacific Ocean offers compelling testimony to the unusual power and scope of this year’s El Nino current.

The strongest satellite evidence yet of the disruptive El Nino shows a spreading sheet of unusually warm Pacific Ocean water half again as large as the continental United States that already is sowing a harvest of unseasonable storms and drought throughout the tropics, scientists and climate experts say. It has grown by a third since May.

The new images from the Jet Propulsion Laboratory’s Topex/Poseidon satellite are a dramatic confirmation of an ambitious federal long-range forecasting effort that has focused worldwide attention on the currents of the eastern Pacific Ocean. It is the first time federal forecasters have relied so heavily on evidence gathered by the satellite for a National Weather Service El Nino forecast.

With an array of orbiting sensors, researchers are watching how the vast current is heating the atmosphere like a hot plate and altering the direction of jet streams, the formation of storms and the patterns of rainfall. The heat it contains represents almost 100 times the annual U.S. energy output from the burning of gasoline, coal, oil and natural gas, JPL researchers said.

The Topex/Poseidon satellite continues to map the growing current every 10 days. Using sensors aboard a second satellite, Christy and his colleagues at NASA’s Marshall Spaceflight Center have detected a band of air along the equator, encompassing more than 15 million square miles, that has been heated by the warm ocean water about 4 degrees above normal.

At the same time, JPL researcher William Read, using sensors aboard a third satellite, is monitoring the buildup of water vapor in the atmosphere over the tropical Pacific to a level of moisture not seen since the El Nino winter of 1982-83, which may be a harbinger of intense winter storms.

Effects Range From Droughts to Flooding

From severe drought in New Guinea and crop failures in New Zealand to floods in Bolivia, the toll exacted by this growing tongue of warm Pacific water--already the second worst El Nino current this century and still growing--is becoming apparent throughout the tropics.

No matter how profound the effect of El Nino on tropical regions, however, climate experts say that no one knows exactly how it may alter the weather of more temperate areas in the Northern Hemisphere, such as California--where some predict heavy rain and others suggest that even drought should not be ruled out.

An El Nino current’s effects are most pronounced and most predictable in the tropical regions along the equator, where the current forms, and are less certain the farther away from the equator one goes, oceanographers and climate experts said.

“There’s been a whole bunch of things we don’t know about El Nino,” said D. James Baker, Commerce’s undersecretary for oceans and atmosphere. “Although we know how the water will warm, the impact of the warming water on the actual distribution of the storms and the drought, we don’t know.”

Drawing the connections between the El Nino and any local weather pattern is a matter of probabilities, historical analysis, sophisticated computer models and educated guesswork, climate experts said.

“Every El Nino is different,” said meteorologist Daniel Cayan, director of the climate research division at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography. “Evidently, El Nino predisposes the [weather] system to have more frequent, more intense storms. These storms tend to come in succession.”

But “we have to remember that some of our driest periods [also] have occurred during El Nino events,” Cayan said.

At a recent congressional hearing on the current El Nino, scientists refused to predict how much rain Southern California would get, how dry the Midwest would be this winter or virtually anything else specific.

“I would prepare for the worst, but be not awfully surprised if it doesn’t happen,” said El Nino expert Tim Barnett at Scripps.

Indeed, California’s weather has been dominated throughout much of the last decade by a succession of El Nino currents, each with quite different effects on local weather. Last year, an unusually chilly Pacific Ocean current--the opposite of an El Nino, known, inevitably, as La Nina--kept world temperatures unseasonably cool.

The size and intensity of this year’s El Nino most resembles the El Nino current that dominated the winter of 1982-83, in which waves and mudslides destroyed 30 homes, flooded 3,000 more and caused about $100 million in damage to the Southern California coastline. It caused an estimated $13 billion in damage worldwide.

But the local high tides this year will be slightly lower than in that year, meaning the power of any storm surf may be diminished, experts said.

Boon Seen for Research Funding

So far, the impact in the United States of the newest El Nino has been almost entirely positive, warding off hurricanes in the Southeast, and bringing tropical species, big waves and warm waters to surfers and fisheries on the West Coast. Although scientists cannot predict what the coming months will bring, policymakers are talking with surety about the worst winter in half a century.

Natural disasters are always good headline-getters for politicians. Swooping down after earthquake, fire or flood, candidates and congressmen, presidents and policymakers make lifelong friends by throwing dollars to the tragedy-stricken.

This year’s El Nino phenomenon, though, offers a unique opportunity: Disaster relief without any of the tragedy--at least so far.

Californians in Congress have leaped to the forefront, flocking to the media spotlight surrounding El Nino like bugs to a lantern in summertime.

Sen. Barbara Boxer (D-Calif.), who faces a strong challenge in her reelection campaign next year, is leading the proactive effort with a publicity campaign encouraging residents to buy flood insurance. Boxer also is organizing the El Nino summit on preparedness scheduled in Los Angeles next month.

“When you’re warned about it by the scientists, you really have a responsibility to act,” she said.

Democratic Rep. Zoe Lofgren of San Jose and Republican Ken Calvert of Riverside both say they support full funding for El Nino research, though they have differed somewhat on how many dollars that translates into; Calvert believes study of global warming should be cut to offset El Nino increases.

“We didn’t bring on the El Nino--Mother Nature did that--but I think it’s a wonderful coincidence,” said one scientist--who asked not to be identified--among dozens in the federal government who are feeling the boon of support on Capitol Hill this year. “The timing’s just been very good. We hope that will translate into additional money.”

President Clinton asked that the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration budget be increased this year from $65 million to $74 million, with most of the new money--$7.65 million--going to El Nino-related work.

That would enable scientists to expand on a project in which 10,000 buoys are strung along the Pacific Ocean and provide satellite weather data within 12 hours on the Internet--adding buoys in the Atlantic and Indian oceans, and moving the study into a more operational phase.

It would also provide about $5 million in research money to look at--among other things--regional impacts of El Nino, such as how much rain Southern California is really likely to get. In addition, it would pay for the study of more prolonged El Nino effects that encompass more than one season, and how major weather events such as Hurricanes Linda and Nora are affected by the El Nino current, which may have helped push the storms toward the southwestern United States.

The Senate has approved the full $74-million appropriation, but the House version of the bill funds NOAA at only $70 million, so the difference will be resolved in a conference committee in the coming weeks. Republican leaders of the Appropriations Committee said on the floor last week that they would be happy to work with Lofgren on filling the gap.

Although leaders from both parties have long supported spending on climatic research and disaster prevention measures, scientists and emergency management officials say this year’s forecast has made it a much easier sell.

“All those politicians who look globally recognize that if Indonesia or Africa or South America has a problem, they’re going to be turning to us for aid, and the more we know about what’s going to happen, the better off we are,” Baker said.

Indeed, officials from the Federal Emergency Management Agency and scientists from NOAA are taking a dollars-and-cents approach to their quest for additional appropriations.

At the hearing on Capitol Hill this month, experts estimated the total value to the U.S. economy of “perfect” predictions at $1 billion to $2 billion a year, noting that the agriculture and fishing industries could make plans to deal with El Nino effects in addition to local governments getting ready for floods or droughts.

Members of Congress acknowledged that the federal government has spent billions of dollars, much of it in California, responding to disasters--earthquakes, floods, fires--over the last several years.

“Rather than continuing to farm out these billions and billions of dollars year by year, I would hope we would” focus on prediction and preparation, said Rep. Tim Roemer (D-Indiana), the ranking minority member of the energy and environment subcommittee.

Michael Armstrong, FEMA’s associate director for mitigation, said he was not worried by any public backlash should forecasts of severe weather not come true. If politicians are attracted to El Nino, so is the public, he said.

“I look at the concerns about El Nino as a window of opportunity for my agency to get inside people’s heads a little bit and say, ‘What can we do to make it safer?’ ” Armstrong said.

Much of the planned mitigation that will be discussed at FEMA’s Los Angeles summit, for example, involves projects that were identified or launched after California’s latest rounds of floods.

Even if El Nino fails to dump three times the normal rainfall on Southern California, as many predict, clearing flood channels and repairing dams can hardly hurt, the experts argue.

“It’s terrific. It’s refreshing. It’s the kind of thing we should be doing more often,” Armstrong said. “Every time we do pre-disaster planning, we not only place people in a more protected situation, but we save money as well.”

Hotz reported from Los Angeles and Wilgoren from Washington.

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El Nino Spurs Global Flood of Preparation

The El Nino phenomenon follows a change in winds that allows a large mass of warm water (the red and white area) normally located near Australia to move eastward along the equator until it reaches the coast of South America.

The displacement of so much warm water alters weather patterns worldwide.

Source: JPL TOPEX / POSEIDON project, Sept. 20 image