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<div class=Section1>
<p class=MsoNormal><span style='font-size:12.0pt;font-family:"Arial","sans-serif"'>Studies
of brewing weather event test understanding of past and future climate.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class=MsoNormal><b><span style='font-size:18.0pt;font-family:"Arial","sans-serif"'>Stalled
El Niño poised to resurge<o:p></o:p></span></b></p>
<p class=MsoNormal><span class=vcard><span style='font-size:12.0pt;font-family:
"Arial","sans-serif"'><a
href="http://www.nature.com/news/stalled-el-ni%C3%B1o-poised-to-resurge-1.15814?WT.ec_id=NATURE-20140904#auth-1"><span
style='color:#5C7996;border:none windowtext 1.0pt;padding:0in'>Mark Zastrow</span></a></span></span><span
style='font-size:12.0pt;font-family:"Arial","sans-serif"'><o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class=MsoNormal><i><span style='font-size:12.0pt;font-family:"Arial","sans-serif"'>Nature
</span></i><span style='font-size:12.0pt;font-family:"Arial","sans-serif"'>513,
15 doi:10.1038/513015a<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class=MsoNormal><span style='font-size:12.0pt;font-family:"Arial","sans-serif"'>02
September 2014<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-left:.5in'><o:p> </o:p></p>
<p class=MsoNormal><span class=apple-converted-space> </span><span
style='font-family:"Arial","sans-serif"'>When Julia Baum tried to fly to the
remote Pacific atoll of Kiritimati with a chest freezer in her luggage last
month, her airline objected. Baum needed it to store samples of the algae that
underpin the atoll’s fragile coral ecosystem. “It was a lot of smiling
and begging,” she recalls. “‘It’s for science!
It’s for coral reefs! Help us!’” Airline officials let it go.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class=MsoNormal><span style='font-size:12.0pt;font-family:"Arial","sans-serif"'><o:p> </o:p></span></p>
<p style='mso-margin-top-alt:0in;margin-right:0in;margin-bottom:19.8pt;
margin-left:0in'><span style='font-family:"Arial","sans-serif"'>This year Baum,
a marine biologist at the University of Victoria in Canada, has an added
incentive to head into the field: the weather pattern known as El Niño is
brewing, and she wants to see what the warming it brings to the tropical
Pacific Ocean will do to the algae that live in the reefs of Kiritimati, part
of the island nation of Kiribati.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p style='mso-margin-top-alt:0in;margin-right:0in;margin-bottom:19.8pt;
margin-left:0in'><span style='font-family:"Arial","sans-serif"'>Hers will be
one of many teams watching this potential El Niño. A growing array of
satellites, moored and free-floating buoys and autonomous underwater vehicles
is tracking changes in ocean temperatures and atmospheric conditions. Those
data are flowing into climate models that try to predict the strength and
timing of this year’s El Niño event — the erratic behaviour of
which has already tested forecasters. If researchers could learn to predict
such events with precision, it would significantly improve their understanding
of the past and future climate.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p style='mso-margin-top-alt:0in;margin-right:0in;margin-bottom:19.8pt;
margin-left:0in'><span style='font-family:"Arial","sans-serif"'>The first signs
of an El Niño came in January, when the east-to-west trade winds that blow
across the tropics suddenly weakened, and a burst of winds from the west
triggered a slow surge of warm water into the eastern equatorial Pacific. In
1997, similar conditions helped to set in motion one of the strongest
El Niño events on record, which caused extreme rainfall along the western
coasts of North and South America and drought in Australia and southeast Asia,
resulting in thousands of deaths and tens of billions of dollars’ worth
of damage.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p style='mso-margin-top-alt:0in;margin-right:0in;margin-bottom:19.8pt;
margin-left:0in'><span style='font-family:"Arial","sans-serif"'>Sustaining an
El Niño requires the ocean and the atmosphere to work together. Normally, the
warming in the eastern Pacific that presages such an event strengthens wind
patterns that push even more warm water eastward. But this year, the atmosphere
did not play its part. As a result, the ocean cooled in May, June and July, and
the El Niño stalled.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p style='mso-margin-top-alt:0in;margin-right:0in;margin-bottom:19.8pt;
margin-left:0in'><span style='font-family:"Arial","sans-serif"'>Anthony
Barnston, a seasonal climate forecaster at Columbia University in New York
City, says the latest data show that winds from the west are again forming
— a second chance for a full-blown El Niño. His team estimates that there
is a 75% chance that a weak to moderate event will form by the end of this
year, just a bit later than researchers had thought. The predictions are in
line with those from the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration
(NOAA), which puts the chance of a weak to moderate El Niño at 65%.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p style='mso-margin-top-alt:0in;margin-right:0in;margin-bottom:19.8pt;
margin-left:0in'><span style='font-family:"Arial","sans-serif"'>Whatever
transpires, the next few months will be an important test for the latest
generation of seasonal forecast models. Scientists struggled to interpret the
wildly divergent predictions provided by models before the El Niño of
1997–98, but this time there is cause for optimism. When the warming of
the eastern Pacific started to slow this summer, the latest models —
which run at higher resolution and on more powerful computers than their
predecessors — predicted that El Niño would stall in the summer and then
resurge. “If we don’t see an El Niño this year, then we have a big
black mark on the model performance,” says Barnston.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p style='mso-margin-top-alt:0in;margin-right:0in;margin-bottom:19.8pt;
margin-left:0in'><span style='font-family:"Arial","sans-serif"'>Other
scientists are trying to learn what they can about El Niño’s links to
future climate change.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p style='mso-margin-top-alt:0in;margin-right:0in;margin-bottom:19.8pt;
margin-left:0in'><span style='font-family:"Arial","sans-serif"'>Climate models
disagree on whether global warming will alter El Niño’s strength or
frequency. But even if the general pattern of El Niño events does not
change, the warming produced by an individual El Niño in an overall warmer
climate could generate more extreme weather, says Wenju Cai, a climate
scientist at the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research
Organisation’s Marine and Atmospheric Research centre in Aspendale,
Australia. “The world is not waking up to that,” says Cai, whose
modelling work suggests that by the end of this century, El Niño events could
become twice as common as they were for most of the twentieth century (<a
href="http://www.nature.com/uidfinder/10.1038/nclimate2100"><span
style='color:#5C7996'>W. Cai</span><span class=apple-converted-space><span
style='color:#5C7996;text-decoration:none'> </span></span><i><span
style='color:#5C7996'>et al. Nature Clim. Change</span></i><span
class=apple-converted-space><span style='color:#5C7996;text-decoration:none'> </span></span><b><span
style='color:#5C7996'>4,</span></b><span class=apple-converted-space><span
style='color:#5C7996;text-decoration:none'> </span></span><span
style='color:#5C7996'>111–116; 2014</span></a>).<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p style='mso-margin-top-alt:0in;margin-right:0in;margin-bottom:19.8pt;
margin-left:0in'><span style='font-family:"Arial","sans-serif"'>Back in the
tropical Pacific, Baum’s colleagues hope to gain a fuller understanding
of El Niño’s history by analysing the oxygen content, salinity and
temperature of water samples from Kiritimati and the Palmyra atoll, a US
territory roughly 680 kilometres away. Researchers will use the data to help to
calibrate records of past climate that are preserved in fossilized coral.
Shifting ratios of oxygen isotopes captured in coral layers can reveal changes
in ocean temperature, providing a record of El Niño events going back
thousands of years.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p style='mso-margin-top-alt:0in;margin-right:0in;margin-bottom:19.8pt;
margin-left:0in'><span style='font-family:"Arial","sans-serif"'>One thing is
certain, says Michael McPhaden, an oceanographer with NOAA in Seattle,
Washington: however this year’s El Niño watch plays out, it will
influence research for several years. “Why has nature surprised us in
this startling way?” he asks. “Figuring it out is going to be
really important.”<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class=MsoNormal><span style='font-family:"Arial","sans-serif"'><o:p> </o:p></span></p>
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