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Science Friday > Archives > 1997 > August > August 22, 1997


El Niño:
Predicting the climate -- and acting on those predictions.

Over the past ten years, climatologists have become able to make reasonably accurate predictions about trends in the world's climate over long periods - from one growing season to a year ahead. A better understanding of how the world's climate functions, as well as more powerful computer models, have made these long-term forecasts possible. And the long-term forecasts, in turn, make possible long-term planning efforts by governments around the world.

The behavior of El Niño and the Southern Oscillation (ENSO), a periodic change in air and water circulation worldwide, has been found to be a key factor in influencing climate worldwide. Changes to El Niño have been linked to floods in one place and droughts in others, to temperature variations, and to famine, outbreaks of disease, and other ecological disasters.

Temperature readings picked up by seaborne buoys indicate that this year's El Niño may be severe -- as bad as the El Niño of 1982-83, which brought storms and flooding to the US, dryness and fires to Australia, and wet weather to southern China at the same time that southern Africa was undergoing drought and famine. We'll talk about how these climate predictions are made, about what the El Niño means to the world's ecology, and about efforts to base global planning policies on these climatological models.

Listen to this program in RealAudio!

Guests:

John Kermond
Visiting Scientist
Office of Global Programs
National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration
Silver Spring, MD

Antonio Moura
Director
International Research Institute for Seasonal to Interannual Climate Prediction
Palisades, NY

Stephen Zebiak
Senior Research Scientist
Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory
Columbia University
Palisades, NY

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Related Links:

PMEL's El Niño Theme Pages
The Climate Prediction Center
NOAA's National Centers for Environmental Prediction
The Climate Group at Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory
Scripps Institution of Oceanography

Animations and Simulations
See the ocean temperature change
Nifty 3-D graphs of climate variations
IRI Animations of January-July Sea Surface Temperature Data