Only a few months ago, El Nino was starting to look like the most overhyped story of the decade. The periodic warming of Pacific Ocean waters that plays havoc with the world's weather was supposed to be the El Nino of the century--worse even than the great El Nino of 1982-83, which left thousands dead and caused $13 billion in property damage. By last fall, however, El Nino had wreaked only piddling levels of destruction in the U.S., and the public was beginning to see it less as an impending apocalypse than as a gimmick to sell 4-by-4s and generate guaranteed laughs for late-night comedians.
Suddenly, El Nino doesn't seem so funny anymore. Last week one of the most powerful storms on record slammed into California, swamping the coast with 30-ft. waves, drenching the state with torrential rains and blasting it with near hurricane-force winds. Rail lines and major highways were cut by floodwaters up and down the coast, and hundreds of homes were destroyed. By week's end two more storms had struck and at least four people had been swept to their death by mudslides and raging waters. With another severe weather system bearing down on the coast--and ocean temperatures in the Pacific still hovering at an unseasonably high 84[degrees]F--there was no relief in sight.
At the same time--despite a huge storm that set off tornadoes in Florida and dumped snow in the Ohio valley last week, killing at least 22 people--large parts of the eastern and north-central U.S. continued to bask in the warmest winter in years, one that brought cherry blossoms to Washington in the first week of January. That might sound like the opposite of a disaster, but every weather anomaly has its dark side. In a normal year, for example, the winter storm that hit New England and southern Canada in January might have dumped a thick blanket of snow on the region. Instead rain fell on low-lying arctic air and glazed everything in sight with thick layers of ice, knocking out power to 4 million people in one of the worst natural disasters in Canadian history.
Indeed, contrary to the widespread impression--and all those jokes about El No-Show--the El Nino of 1997-98 never really faltered. When you put it all together--forest fires in Indonesia, typhoons in Japan, torrential rains in East Africa, unusually powerful hurricanes in the Pacific, flash floods in Peru and Ecuador, freak snowstorms in Mexico--this El Nino has already unleashed more than its share of epic mayhem. But precisely because its reach is so long and its effects so broadly distributed around the globe, it has been difficult for most people to appreciate the full force of the beast that underlies it all.
The scientists who make it their business to track the world's weather, however, have appreciated it all along. This El Nino may be the most studied weather phenomenon of all time. For months, and in some cases years, meteorologists have been poring over weather maps, running supercomputer simulations, studying coral reefs, tree rings and glacial ice--all to try to understand the dynamics of a pool of warm water in the Pacific.