By: Daniel Cobb

Topping news media lists for the last ten years, El'NiZo is now widely known as the world's number one weather trouble-maker.  It has been blamed for causing floods, droughts, heat waves, devastating coastal storms in California, and mid-winter tornado outbreaks over the southeast United States.  The last El'NiZo occurred in 1997 and was the largest one ever ob

served.  By March of 1997 just about anything unpleasant, whether weather related or not, was being blamed on El'NiZo.  So after taking a five year vacation, it is again returning and is already responsible for causing  a storm of speculation.

By now, you may be wondering what will El'NiZo have in store for Maine?  We are already in the worst drought of the last 40 years and just coming out of one of the warmest winters of modern history.  So, what now?  What is El'NiZo anyway?  Why does it exist and can we do anything about it?

El'NiZo is Spanish and roughly translates to English as "the little boy".  It was so named by fishermen in Peru who noted over decades that about every four years around Christmas, an abrupt warming of the sea occurred off the coast of Peru and the west coast of South America.  More importantly for the fishermen, the warming coincided

with a marked drop-off in the Anchovy catch. In 1982, a record warming of the sea crippled the Anchovy fishery.

However, the Peru Anchovy fishery was not the only weather casualty, that winter brought crazy weather world wide.  That was the year the evening news showed us on a regular basis homes in Malibu, California falling into the Pacific as huge waves sliced them in half. Floods ravaged the Ohio and Mississippi rivers.  And globally, summer rains failed to come and as a result drought ravaged Australia, India, and much of southeast Asia.

Climatologists (weather historians) and oceanographers immediately started to investigate. It did not take long for them to arrive at a conclusion.  All the evidence pointed towards the Pacific Ocean and El'NiZo gained front page infamy.  Scientists

found that the warming of the waters off Peru was not local, but was part of a large shift in seawater temperatures across the entire tropical Pacific Ocean.  Coincident with the shift in sea temperatures was a shift in tropical air currents globally, and in thunderstorm activity from the western to the central Pacific.  The shift in thunderstorm activity changed the normal position and flow of the jet stream.  The change in the position of the jet stream over the Pacific quickly caused jet stream shifts over the United States and the rest of the world. 

The jet stream is a river of fast flowing air at about 30,000 feet in the atmosphere and it wraps around the entire world.  There are actually two major jet streams, one in the northern and one in southern hemisphere.  A jet stream occurs where warm tropical and cold po