El Nino could spark floods and mudslides in California
"This is looking to be a fairly massive event," Daniel Cayan, director of the Climate Research Division at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography in La Jolla, California, said of the phenomenon known as El Nino.
The institution was the site earlier this week of a gathering of 250 disaster preparedness officials from around the state who listened to the dire warnings of the experts and discussed how to prepare for potential disaster.
They were told that even as the state basks under blue skies and balmy temperatures and the palm trees wave softly in the breeze, a monster is lurking off the coast waiting to strike.
El Nino -- Spanish for The Child -- is a weather system that occurs every few years and was named by South American fishermen because it strikes at about Christmas time, the birth of Jesus Christ.
This year, however, the experts say El Nino will arrive early, perhaps as soon as September, and may last well into next spring.
El Nino is a warming of the eastern portion of the central Pacific Ocean that creates the second most powerful weather force on the planet after the seasons.
This year, the experts say, El Nino could spawn the worst havoc since the winter of 1982-83, and could even surpass it. All the signs are there, Vernon Kousky of the National Weather Service's Climate Prediction Center in Camp Springs, Maryland, told Reuters.
"El Nino is definitely with us. It is already here," he said, pointing to temperatures off the California coast that are much warmer than usual. He said he expected the storms in California to begin as early as September and last until the spring of 1998.
Kousky forecast that this season's El Nino would be "very comparable to the 1982-83 El Nino, but perhaps extended."
That storm devastated southern California, killing more than 20 people, creating the worst floods of the century and burying expensive hillside homes in areas such as Malibu under tons of mud. Damage was estimated in the billions of dollars.
Kousky and others said the rest of the United States could also expect to feel the effects of El Nino, although not as severely as California.
The southern portion of the country could expect wetter weather than normal, with the gulf states experiencing cooler than normal temperatures. But to the north, from the Rockies to the eastern seaboard, the winter was likely to be much milder than usual, he said.
Not everyone agrees with the doomsayers, however. Scripps meteorologist Clive Dorman showed up at this week's meeting with disaster officials equipped with water flotation devices to mock his colleagues who were predicting rainfall four times the average in California.
"When people hear El Nino is coming to California, they should know it could mean drought or lots of rain," he said in a reference to past mild El Ninos that have produced very dry conditions.
But his was a lone voice of dissent.
"Better to be prepared than not to be prepared. If the forecasts are wrong, so much the better. If you ignore them and they prove to be accurate, more fool you, and more fool the people you are supposed to be protecting," said Antonio Moura, head of Columbia University's Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory.
Kousky said the current El Nino was far from mild and had already made its impact felt in South America. "What we are seeing is the total annihilation of the fishing industry off Ecuador and Peru. The waters are too warm to sustain the small fish that the larger fish feed off.
"In Chile we are seeing a harbinger of what could happen in California. Northern Chile has received more than its annual rainfall in a very short period and there has been severe flooding, even in desert regions," he said.
Elsewhere, the Philippines is preparing for an El Nino-induced drought, Hong Kong is experiencing its wettest year in more than a century, and Australia has cut its projected Gross National Product by 1.5 percent because of drought conditions caused by El Nino.
By MICHAEL MILLER, Reuters
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