Re: Digest for apes-doucette@googlegroups.com - 1 Message in 1 Topic

0 views
Skip to first unread message

steve doucette

unread,
Apr 26, 2011, 12:09:23 AM4/26/11
to apes-d...@googlegroups.com
Lauren, You should know the following (Wikipedia has good information which I took some of this from. I will talk about this in class this week):
While the causes are not well understood, every 5-7 years, warm water spreads from the west Pacific and the Indian Ocean to the east Pacific (which would be the America's side of the Pacific Ocean). It takes the rain with it, causing extensive drought in the western Pacific (especially Indonesia and Australia where they have many brush fires as a result) and rainfall in the normally dry eastern Pacific (namely Peru but also Mexico and southern California).

El Niño's warm rush of nutrient-poor tropical water, heated by its eastward passage in the Equatorial Current, replaces the cold, nutrient-rich surface water of the Humboldt Current. When El Niño conditions last for many months, extensive ocean warming and the reduction in Easterly Trade winds limits upwelling of cold nutrient-rich deep water and its economic impact to local fishing for an international market can be serious.

The Southern Oscillation is the atmospheric component of El Niño. This component is an oscillation in surface air pressure between the tropical eastern and the western Pacific Ocean waters. The main result in this is a decrease in the trade winds (those nice winds in Hawaii) and a decrease in rainfall in eastern and northern Australia. 



On Mon, Apr 25, 2011 at 7:42 PM, <apes-douce...@googlegroups.com> wrote:

Group: http://groups.google.com/group/apes-doucette/topics


Reply all
Reply to author
Forward
0 new messages