El Niño Strengthens
Pastor Dale Morgan
El Niño Strengthens *
Updated 12/7/2006 4:56 PM ET
NEW YORK (Reuters) — El Niño, a climate phenomena which typically wreaks
havoc but was a key factor for a mild 2006 hurricane season, will peak
this winter and gradually vanish by spring, a U.S. government agency
predicted Thursday.
The Climate Prediction Center, which tracks El Niño and is part of the
National Oceanic Atmospheric Administration, said the climate pattern
"will peak during the Northern Hemisphere winter followed by weakening
during March to May 2007."
El Niño is an abnormal warming of waters in the equatorial Pacific Ocean
that disrupts weather patterns from the Pacific all the way to Africa.
It normally causes drought in Australia, Indonesia and the Philippines
while spawning rampant flooding in Latin American nations like Ecuador
and Chile.
This year's El Niño was widely credited with drastically curtailing the
formation of hurricanes in the Atlantic Ocean, giving a respite to the
Gulf Coast and Central American countries hit hard during the
record-setting hurricane season of 2005.
There were only nine tropical storms and hurricanes this year, well down
from the 28 named storms of 2005 including Katrina and Rita which
flooded New Orleans and devastated the coasts of Louisiana and Mississippi.
El Niño means 'little boy' in Spanish, but the pattern was named after
the Christ child after it was first noticed by Latin American anchovy
fishermen in the 19th century, mostly because this anomaly would would
peak during Christmastime.
The Center said North America would see "warmer-than-average
temperatures over western and central Canada, and over the northwestern
and northern United States" during January to March 2007.
There would also be "wetter-than-average conditions over portions of the
Gulf Coast and Florida, and drier-than-average conditions in the Ohio
Valley and in portions of the Pacific Northwest," it projected.
From December to March, the weather will be drier than normal "over
most of Malaysia, Indonesia, northern and eastern Australia, some of the
U.S.-affiliated islands in the tropical North Pacific (and) northern
South America and southeastern Africa," the Center forecast.
And it will be wetter-than-average in equatorial East Africa, the
central South American countries of Uruguay, northeastern Argentina,
southeastern Paraguay and southern Brazil, as well as along the coasts
of Ecuador and northern Peru, according to the Center's forecast.
The last severe El Niño took place in 1997-98, killing more than 2,000
people and causing damage that topped $33 billion.