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  Yahoo News 1 Dec 06
El Nino established in Pacific, upsets weather: WMO

GENEVA (AFP) - A "moderate" El Nino current is now established in the Pacific basin, triggering a serious drought in Australia, heavy rain in East Africa and heralding other severe weather conditions over coming months, the UN's weather agency has said.

"A moderate El Nino doesn't mean the impact will be moderate," said Rupa Kumarkolli, a scientist at the World Meteorological Organisation. The WMO warned in its update bulletin that the "moderate" rating did not give "cause for complacency".

El Nino is an occasional seasonal warming of the central and eastern Pacific Ocean that upsets normal weather patterns from the western seaboard of Latin America to East Africa, and potentially has a global impact on climate.

The WMO said that the climatic phenomenon "is now established across the tropical Pacific Basin and is expected to continue until at least the first quarter of 2007", although it may persist for even longer.

Sea surface temperatures in the region were one to 1.5 degrees celsius warmer than usual in October and were expected to rise, it added. The WMO said a "particularly strong pattern of unusually cool temperatures" had also taken hold in equatorial areas of the western Pacific and eastern Indian Ocean.

The combined effects since the climatic conditions started to appear in August have included drought in Australia and Indonesia, storms in the western Pacific islands, and extremely heavy rainfall in East Africa, the agency said. That pattern is expected to be reinforced over the next few months, according to the update.

Australians have been hit by a combination of dry but unsually cold conditions and strong winds this month. Kenya, Somalia and Ethiopia are struggling with heavy rain and flooding that has swept farmlands, disrupted food supplies and cut off villages, affecting hundreds of thousands of people.

El Nino is associated with more severe winter monsoons in South Asia. Parts of Asia have been battered by violent storms in a strong cyclone season recently.

By contrast, the El Nino effect may have had a beneficial impact on the Caribbean basin, following destructive record-strength hurricanes there in 2005 that notably saw the US Gulf Coast ravaged by Hurricane Katrina.

"Usually El Nino is associated with a weak hurricane season," Kumarkolli, the WMO's El Nino expert, explained.

Developments in the equatorial Pacific region between March and May 2007 "will be criticial to determining whether El Nino persists for the rest of next year," the WMO said.

Spanish for "the boy", El Nino's "strong" appearance in 1997-1998 helped trigger severe rainfall, cyclones and bushfires across America, Africa, Asia and Australia that led to an estimated 22,000 deaths. The damage caused by those catastrophes was put at 34 billion dollars (26.8 billion euros). Scientists are still trying to fully understand El Nino's effects and action in combination with other weather patterns.
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