SAN ANTONIO — The current El Nino weather anomaly appears to
be fading, and its impact has been muted in North America with normal weather
conditions seen this year over the corn and soybean growing region of the
Midwest, climate scientists said.
The scientific jury on the issue remains out, however, and
more time is needed to determine if it is in fact losing steam, they added.
The El Nino phenomenon warms sea surface temperatures in the
Pacific Ocean and can disrupt weather patterns across the Western Hemisphere to
the west coast of Africa.
"There are indications that it is fading fast. There are
model simulations which are pointing to that," said Louis Uccellini, director of
the National Centers for Environment Prediction, which is part of the US
government’s National Oceanic & Atmospheric Administration.
He said there was no consensus on this yet and that there was
much ongoing discussion among scientists.
"I think we need another month of model simulations before we
can say that this thing will really decrease as rapidly as the current models
are now saying, or whether this will extend into the spring as was originally
forecast," he told Reuters on the sidelines of the annual meeting of the
American Meteorological Society in San Antonio, Texas.
The last severe El Nino, in 1997-98, sparked widespread
forest fires in Asia, killed more than 2,000 people and caused property damage
worth an estimated $33 billion.
Uccellini said the current El Nino developed quite rapidly
last year in the Northern Hemisphere spring and into the summer, but the
patterns were unusual.
"The heavy precipitation has been further north than what was
expected and it’s drier in the California area (than was expected)," he said.
"I would say that we will be looking at more normal kinds of
conditions rather than drier ones over the (U.S.) Midwest (this year)," he said.
Bill Patzert of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena,
California, said in North America it was a "flip-flop" of the standard El Nino.
"It is behaving very non-El Nino-like ... In the typical El
Nino, the northern tier of the United States tends to be relatively mild and
dry, whereas the southern tier of the United States from L.A. to Atlanta tends
to be unusually wet," he said.
"Now in L.A. we are on track for the driest winter in 100
years — on the other hand Seattle has had record-breaking rainfall. So it’s a
flip-flop," he said.
He also said that it seemed to be losing force.
"We are in the tail end of the El Nino now — it’s definitely
on the fade."
El Nino means "little boy" in Spanish. The pattern was named
after the Christ child when it was first noticed by Latin American anchovy
fishermen in the 19th century because it tends to peak around Christmas time.
