An "El Nino" warming has developed in the Pacific Ocean, but it's too early to predict what effect it will have, if any, on Utah and other areas of the West, the Salt Lake office of the National Weather Service says.
And William J. Alder, meteorologist in charge of the office, labeled as "too premature and exaggerated" a recent Scripps Howard News Service story that said the El Nino is certain to cause storms, floods and droughts worldwide during the next 18 months.El Ninos form when the easterly trade winds die down over the equatorial Pacific. Winds become very light and/or flow in a westerly direction. The ocean temperature continues to warm near the equator because colder water is no longer flowing into this area from the northwestern coast of South American.
The Mexican term "el nino" means "small child" and is so named because the weather phenomenon normally commences during the Christmas season.In the Scripps Howard story, writer Don Kirkman said the "uncertainty is over" regarding El Nino. He quoted National Weather climatologist Vernon Kousky of the Climate Analysis Center, Camp Springs, Md., as saying that the only question still to be answered is how intense the El Nino will be. "That will become clearer during the next several months," Kousky said.
Alder said the warmer Pacific water tends to increase thunderstorm activity, which in turns increases westerly winds across the Pacific and influences storm tracks. Whatever storm track becomes established, it tends to repeat itself. When areas of the country become stormy or devoid of storms, they usually stay that way, he said.
But El Ninos "have been very erratic in Utah. We have had extremely wet periods attributed to El Nino in 1983 and 1984, but the drought years of 1976 and 1977 were very dry. Another dry pattern developed during an El Nino in the mid-1980s," Alder said.
"It's very predictable what's going to happen with an El Nino in the southeastern part of the country and the Gulf Coast. It is almost always wet there. And the northern Rockies and southwestern Canada are usually warm and dry."
Jim Cisco, a Salt Lake Weather Service meteorologist who studied El Ninos intensively while enrolled at Pennsylvania State University, said an El Nino has varying effects across the world.
For Salt Lake City and the rest of the western United States, the correlation is not strong between wet or dry or cold or warm conditions, he said.
"What we've seen during El Nino years in the West is a tremendous variability in precipitation and temperature. I don't think you can say that the El Nino (now in the Pacific) is necessarily going to bring a particular type of weather to the West," Cisco said.
Saying the Scripps Howard story is a "bit sensational," the meteorologist said an El Nino is not an "earth-shattering topic. An El Nino is a normal occurrence every four to six years for the earth's ocean/atmosphere system. The El Nino ties the oceans and the atmosphere together. It's a periodic event that appears to help redistribute some of the Earth's energy from the tropics to the temperate latitudes," Cisco said.
Kirkman said in his story that "if the Pacific's temperatures soar 12 to 15 degrees above normal - as they did in 1982-83 - the world will suffer a weather disaster."
Alder challenged these figures, saying that water in the Pacific normally only warms 1 to 2 degrees. He said none of the El Ninos have been as strong for Utah as the droughts and floods in the early 1980s.
Cisco said the most important thing to remember is that there is "no consistent correlation between the weather in Utah and the El Nino in the South Pacific and how it affects the rest of the world. If I had reason to believe that Utah should be shaking in its boots, I would say it directly. But I'm not in a position to say that, because it is unclear about the effects (this) El Nino would have on Utah."