June 18, 1997 - Ocean conditions thousands of miles west of Los Angeles indicate that
next winter's storms may be among the worst in half a century, the government's
top long-range weather forecaster said Tuesday.
Building its predictions on such seemingly small anomalies as a rise
of 2 degrees Celsius in the temperature of the normally chilly central Pacific's
surface waters, the federal government said that the anticipated El Niño
storms could rival those that brought havoc to the West Coast in 1982 and
1983.
Those storms lashed the coast with giant waves and high tides, sending
homes from Malibu to Santa Barbara sliding into the ocean, along with a
large chunk of the Santa Monica pier.
In Orange County, the waves ripped the ends off the Huntington Beach
and Seal Beach piers.
Worldwide, the disruption to weather patterns was blamed for 1,500 deaths
and $8 billion in damage.
Tuesday's predictions are more alarming than earlier forecasts, which
were built on initial consideration of satellite observations and suggested
merely a worse-than-normal winter.
"If you look through the recent history, of the past 50 or 60 years,
what we're seeing out there equals the top three," said Ants Leetmaa,
director of the U.S. Climate Prediction Center.
And over the course of the typical summer, he said, the El Niñoproducing
conditions only get worse.
Speaking with the caution inherent in those who make long-range weather
predictions, he added: "We're pretty concerned."
Beyond California, the shifting weather pattern also can create fierce
conditions and have a devastating long-range impact. In southern Asia, for
example, where monsoons replenish moisture-deprived farmlands, an El Niño
could shift life-giving rains eastward, creating the prospect of famine-driven
drought in India and Indonesia.
El Niño's only potentially significant benefit is a reduced likelihood
that hot, dry Santa Ana winds would threaten Southern California with brush
fires.
"It'll be so wet they won't matter," should the winds arrive
later than normal and occur during the winter, Leetmaa said. And, he added,
the anticipated winter precipitation is likely to increase the snowpack
as far east as the Rockies.
The government's predictions came barely two weeks after scientists at
the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena culled satellite data and offered
a tentative warning that the winter rainy season could be worse than usual.
The conditions that trigger the storms and drought are named El Niño"the
little boy" in Spanishafter the Christ child because they generally
arrive in December.
The JPL predictions were the first such forecasts made so far in advance
and took advantage of increasingly sophisticated climate models and high-speed
computer processing.
In terms of West Coast weather, the El Niño condition of 1982-83
was "the event of the century," JPL oceanographer Bill Patzert
said Tuesday. The Climate Prediction Center, a division of the National
Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, was able to take the JPL data and
apply it to more sophisticated weather models, leading to forecasts that
are potentially more accurateand in this case also more alarming, he
said.
Patzert said forecasters are seeing the same indications that occurred
before the 1982-83 storms.
Those indications include not only the increase in water temperature
in the central tropical Pacific but a 4 degrees Celsius rise in water temperatures
off Baja California, Ecuador and Peru. And, he said, the presence of albacore
tuna relatively close to San Diego rivaled the appearance of the sport fish
in the spring before previous stormy winters.
The increased water temperature, although barely noticeable to the touch,
is dramatic enough to shift wind and rain patterns across a swath of the
globe stretching from southern Asia at least across the northern United
States as far east as the Great Lakes region, where warmerthan-normal
weather would result.
The shift occurs when warm, moist air rises from the surface of the Pacific
and disrupts the weather-steering jet stream in the upper atmosphere, where
weather systems develop.
Butas dicey as five-day weather forecasts still can be from time
to timelooking at current conditions and leaping to predictions claiming
anything more certain than a likelihood is a particularly uncertain course,
oceanographers and meteorologists said.
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