El Nino Not Expected to Return in the Next Year

U.S. forecasters said on Friday they did not foresee a return of the El Nino weather pattern, blamed for chaotic weather worldwide, for the next year.

Meteorologists at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration said El Nino, a periodic warming of the central Pacific Ocean, will not return soon because its sister, La Nina, is still alive and well.

“We can only reliably predict nine months to a year from now,” and there is “definitely not” going to be another El Nino during this time, said Vernon Kousky, chief of the analysis branch at the NOAA Climate Prediction Center in Washington.

Kousky predicts La Nina, the periodic cooling of sea-surface temperatures in the central Pacific Ocean, will last until next spring.

NOAA’s forecasts come in light of predictions by U.N. weather analysts on Friday that a new El Nino weather pattern is a reasonable possibility next year or in 2001.

“The history of these things suggests we can expect a recurrence of El Nino once the current La Nina is over,” said a one specialist at the U.N.’s World Meteorological Organization.

Accurate predictions of El Nino and La Nina weather conditions could save economies billions of dollars by preparing people for floods or droughts, NOAA officials say.

The last El Nino, which began in 1997 and ended in June 1998, brought landslides in California and abnormally wet weather in the rest of the nation. Globally, at its peak, El Nino was blamed for flooding in East Africa, severe drought in New Zealand and damage of more than $2 billion in Ecuador.

The world is in the middle of experiencing La Nina, which has been blamed for the abnormal hurricane activity in the Atlantic Ocean and for contributing to drought in the eastern United States. Internationally, torrential rain has hit Australia and Indonesia abnormally hard this season, while drying up precious farmland in Argentina.

El Nino and La Nina result from the interaction between the surface of the ocean and the atmosphere in the tropical Pacific. Changes in the ocean affect the atmosphere and climate patterns around the globe. In turn, changes in the atmosphere affect the ocean temperatures and currents.