The Pacific Ocean warming that has caused storms and droughts around the world is fizzling and soon will be a bad memory.
If marine meteorologists are correct, the El Nino warming that began last year in the mid-Pacific is surprisingly breaking up after only seven months. As a result, it will go into the weather record books as the briefest El Nino of the 20th century."It's fading rapidly," said National Weather Service El Nino watcher Vernon Kousky. "Sea temperatures in most areas of the Pacific are back to normal."
During its brief but nasty visit, the El Nino caused equatorial sea surface temperatures to rise 5 to 10 degrees along a 6,000-mile swath from the Gilbert Islands in the mid-Pacific to the coasts of Peru and Ecuador. The warming began in November, peaked in April, and has been ebbing since mid-May.
Its impact on the world's weather was profound. In the United States, moisture from the tropical Pacific caused tremendous rainfalls in Texas, Louisiana and nearby states during the winter and early spring.
The Pacific warming also caused unusually warm winter and spring temperatures in the western United States and Canada.
This El Nino undoubtedly will be remembered for the severe droughts it caused. The worst hit area is South Africa, where an El Nino-caused weather pattern produced little precipitation during the area's winter-spring rainy season. South Africa is enduring its worst dryness of the century.
Droughts also parched Australia, Indonesia, the Philippines, the central Pacific and northern Brazil, and delayed the beginning of India's monsoon.
As usually occurs during El Ninos, torrential rains fell on Argentina, southern Brazil, Ecuador, Peru and Uruguay, and hurricanes prowled areas of the Pacific where they infrequently occur, near Tahiti.
Meteorologists will remember the 1991-92 El Nino for its brevity. Normally, the Pacific warmings last about a year, and some have upset the world's weather for 18 months.
In terms of intensity, the '91-92 warming was moderately strong, Kousky said, but it wasn't a massive killer like the 1982-83 event.
If the Pacific follows its age-old El Nino cycle, the next warming will occur in 1995 or 1996.