The Wait for El Nino Sows Seeds of Fear on Farmlands

Coffee beans could shrivel on the shrub in Indonesia, scorching heat could pop corn in the husk in the South African summer, and sheep could face withering temperatures in New Zealand.

But for Irvine strawberry grower A.G. Kawamura, ground zero is the ditch outside his office, which he enlarged a few days ago with a backhoe in case El Nino douses his fields with rains of biblical proportion.

As El Nino bears down, nowhere is the angst greater than among those who make their living off the land. Past El Ninos have wreaked economic havoc worldwide, with an estimated $13 billion in damage laid to the 1982-83 encounter, the worst El Nino recorded this century.

Worldwide, farmers and commodities traders are keeping a wary eye on forecasters’ often doomsday-esque scenarios about the latest El Nino, which range from predictions of wheat-roasting drought Down Under to flooding in Southern California vegetable fields.

Bolstered by the latest in satellite sensors and infrared maps, outspoken weather prognosticators have become celebrities of the moment, even as they warn against blind acceptance of calamitous predictions based on El Nino’s past behaviors. This one, after all, is different.

“It is the earliest and strongest El Nino on record,” said Fred Gesser, chief forecaster for Strategic Weather Services in Omaha.

This year’s edition could rival the episode of 1982.

El Nino--named years ago by Peruvian fishermen for the Christ child because it typically occurs around Christmas--is already punching its way through South America, setting up a crazy quilt of climatic effects that go far beyond the normal extremes of weather.

Global discombobulation begins when unusually warm Pacific Ocean temperatures appear off the coast of South America, roiling weather and food chain patterns.

As the effects on farmers ripple unpredictably throughout the world, one possibility is clear: El Nino could emerge as an excuse to pass on higher costs of all sorts.

“El Nino will be blamed for just about everything--your hurt toe, tennis elbow and a higher grocery bill,” said Dan Basse, executive vice president of AgResource Co., a Chicago research company.

Commodities traders say it is too early to know how food shoppers will be affected by El Nino-related vagaries. Other factors weigh in as well. Southeast Asia’s currency turmoil, along with drought, is driving up the price for palm oil, for example.

In grain markets, prices have fallen back from the spikes of August, when drought seemed to spell disaster for Australia’s big wheat crop. But yield-saving rains came along in September.

Still, the longer-term forecast is for parched conditions there. And in New Zealand, experts have warned of higher irrigation costs and lower cattle and lamb yields.

Traders are scratching their heads over why China exported corn over the summer even though its harvest is said to have been substantially cut by an El Nino-caused drought. Corn production in South Africa, meanwhile, is expected to suffer from searing heat as summer progresses.

Among other things, El Nino’s effects illustrate agriculture’s increasingly global nature.

Catches of anchovies and sardines off Peru have dropped as the fish move offshore into cooler waters. Because some of the fish are turned into livestock feed, the migration paves the way for higher costs for cattle farmers as far away as Ireland.

With Latin America already feeling the effects, the governments of Peru, Ecuador, Bolivia and Costa Rica have declared national emergencies.

In Colombia, where officials are playing down its impact, El Nino has swept through 13 of 31 states, drying up rivers and streams and leaving formerly lush pastures brown and scarred. Water levels in area reservoirs are down at least 30%.

Three months of drought have wiped out 240,000 acres of Colombian corn, soybeans and sorghum, according to the National Assn. of Cereal Producers. And the National Commodities Exchange reports that cotton and rice production have fallen 23% and 10%, respectively.

Mountainsides are black and bare from forest fires, with stones and earth ready to tumble in massive landslides. Cattle, left to feed on the stalks of harvested rice and cotton shoots, have grown weak and skinny, producing neither meat nor milk as before.

“It’s extremely serious,” said Tulio Gutierrez, a rancher and rice grower in Huila state. “Many farmers have seen their production drop because of the drought, and others are not even planting for fear of what would happen to the crops if they come up.”

In the drought-stricken Sabana de Bogota, which produces 95% of Colombia’s $500-million-a-year cut-flower crop, extremely sunny days are producing early-morning frosts that could damage the harvest for Valentine’s Day, analysts say.

Past El Ninos have tended to aid some agricultural regions in Brazil. “We have had big crops in the South and Southeast due to more rain,” said Amilcar Gramacho, coordinator of the technical department of the Organization of Brazilian Cooperatives. But he acknowledged that a persistent drought in the Northeast could mean a drop of about 3 million tons of grain if farmers don’t plant.

Brazilian coffee producers are not overly concerned--yet. But if drought persists, there could be problems with the next crop.

Likewise, in tinder-dry Indonesia, where most of the world’s supply of Robusta coffee beans is grown, ill-conceived slashing and burning of forests to clear the way for agriculture has sent up clouds of smoke.

With forecasters predicting that El Nino-related dry conditions will last at least through March, some analysts are projecting that the coffee harvest in Indonesia could be off by as much as 25%.

In southern Mexico, farmers blame a lack of summer rain for losses of 1 million tons of corn and bean crops so far this year, said Manuel Contijoch Escontria, general director of the Trust Fund for Agricultural Development, a federal agency that insures farmers against crop loss.

If this El Nino mimics those of 1982 and 1991, which hit corn crops and cattle herds especially hard in Mexico, Contijoch fears farmers are in for years of difficulty. Past El Nino cycles have lasted as long as four years. Mexico’s losses in 1995 alone approached $1 billion.

What worries Refugio Gonzalez, a University of California agriculture extension agent in El Centro, is the mud that heavy rains will create around the mostly unpaved roads in Baja California. Mud could impede the movement of heavy equipment and trucks that harvest and transport crops.

“A lot of the infrastructure you have in the Imperial Valley [of California] is nonexistent in Baja California,” Gonzalez said.

Short Baja harvests would surely affect prices for consumers in Southern California, which receives a significant percentage of winter vegetables from the region.

The outlook for California, particularly the Southland, is unclear, forecasters say.

“You’re in a bind in California on this El Nino stuff,” said Michael Glantz of the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, Colo. “You seem to be in a transition zone.” In other words, sometimes it’s wet and sometimes it’s dry.

In Orange County, farmers are preparing for the worst. Strawberry grower David Shultz, who leases land from Irvine Co., has installed a $25,000 system of hoops over his fields in case he needs to erect plastic “umbrellas” to cover the vulnerable plants. Meanwhile, Shultz’s side business, selling sandbags, is booming.

An avid fisherman, Shultz is basing his predictions on his recent unusual catches of varieties normally found farther south. “Every year we have a great yellowtail . . . and marlin year, we end up with a pretty wet year,” he said.

Past El Ninos have often benefited the Midwestern U.S. with mild weather producing bumper crops, a situation that could recur in 1998.

In Canada, the world’s second-coldest country after Russia, the prospect of a warmer winter with less snow is welcome.

To prepare, farmers are getting lessons in “stubble management.” By leaving taller-than-normal stalks of grain in the ground after the fall harvest, farmers can protect against erosion, said Peter Dzikowski of Alberta Agriculture in western Canada.

Wherever they are, farmers must be aware that El Nino predictions are a mighty iffy thing.

“The onset year is probably the easiest to forecast,” said Gesser of Strategic Weather Services. “It’s next year I’m worried about.”

*

Contributing to this story were Times staff writers Dexter Filkins in New Delhi, Chris Kraul in Mexico City, David Lamb in Hanoi, Ann M. Simmons in Nairobi, Rone Tempest in Beijing and Craig Turner in New York; Times researchers Paula Gobbi in Rio de Janeiro and Chi Jung Nam in Seoul; and special correspondent Steven Ambrus in Bogota. Reuters reports were also used.

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Monitoring El Nino

In predicting the scope and impact of the El Nino current, scientists rely on a system of boats, buoys and satellites in the tropical Pacific to collect data that are then analyzed with the help of supercomputers. The boats, buoys and satellites all feed data into computer models that are used to make long-term weather forecasts.

IN THE WATER

The Tropical Atmosphere Ocean (TAO) array includes about 70 moored buoys that take measurements and transmit them via the Argos satellite system. The TAO array was designed specifically to improve detection and forecasting of El Nino conditions.

TAO employs two kinds of buoys. ATLAS buoys measure ocean temperatures up to 500 meters below sea, plus air temperature, surface winds and relative humidity. The buoys are made from foam and fiberglass, with an aluminum tower for transmitting data. A sensor cable 525 meters long is clamped to a wire rope.

In addition, five buoys measure ocean currents, rainfall, shortwave radiation and other environmental conditions. A fleet of drifting buoys also measures sea surface temperature and how fast the water at the surface is moving. These buoys, known as global lagrangian drifters, are also equipped with barometers to measure atmospheric pressure and submergence sensors. Data has been collected from about 2,500 buoys since 1990.

Temperature probes on ships also provide important data. The Joint Environmental Data Analysis Center at the Scripps Institute of Oceanography in La Jolla measures changes in ocean water temperatures.

Dozens of sea stations run by the University of Hawaii Sea Level Center take measurements of the sea level in the tropical Pacific Ocean. The information is collected into databases and used by the El Nino/Southern Oscillation observing system.

FROM THE SKY

Several satellite systems, including two at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, also collect data that helps in understanding El Nino conditions. The Topex/Poseiden satellite project, which is jointly administered with France, bounce radar signals off the ocean surface to take very precise measurements of the surface height all the way from space. Every 10 days, the satellite makes a complete picture of ocean surface heights around the globe. Where the water is higher, it is also warmer. the data is used to track the circulation of ocean waters.

Another satellite project, the Microwave Limb Sounder experiment, measures the amount of water vapor above the oceans_another important factor in predicting the weather. This project, attached to the Upper Atmosphere Research Satellite, was originally designed to study the ozone levels in the atmosphere but has been adapted to study water vapor.

All of this data and more is sent to the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, Colo. Powerful computers crunch the data through weather models to come up with long-term forecasts.

IN THE LAB

Data from the buoys and satellites is relayed to a receiving station at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s Pacific Marine Environmental Laboratory in Seattle, where it is formatted and loaded onto a server. Then NOAA’s National Center for Environmental Prediction in Camp Springs, Md., feeds that data into its climate prediction models to arrive at a long-term forecast.

The models are based on three fundamental laws of physics that govern motion, thermodynamics and the behavior of water. On top of that are layered tens of thousands of lines of computer code that describe the influence of factors like mountains, clouds and ocean temperature. When ocean temperatures change due to El Nino conditions, the result is a long-term forecast that can be dramatically different than normal weather patterns.

q Nino along the equator, where the buoys are stationed.