With the way things are going, El Niño and its counterpart La Niña may be blamed for every natural disaster on the planet. Hardly a month has gone by in the past four years when there
hasnt been a report tying El Niño or its counterpart La Niña to
some devastating event. The phenomena have already been linked to
everything from tornadoes in the midwestern United States to fires in
Indonesia to hurricanes in Central America. But Earth scientists still
have much to learn about how the phenomena affect weather systems around
the world. Many questions regarding the root cause and physics behind
the two events remain unanswered. Predicting exactly when and with what
force El Niño or La Niña will strike continues to be elusive.
To improve our understanding of El Niño, Raghu Murtugudde and a team
of researchers at NASAs Goddard Space Flight Center have been
observing algae in the Pacific Ocean. They believe that by watching the
algaes movements during El Niños and La Niñas they can gain
insight into the processes that drive these events.
Their initial results show promise. Using the first year of data
returned from NASA's new Sea-viewing Wide Field-of-View Sensor
(SeaWiFS), the scientists have found a way to detect the end of El Niño
and the beginning of La Niña a month earlier than anyone else. In
the future, the researchers hope to detect other stages of the
phenomenas' development and then create models to predict the events'
occurrence and their destructive force years in advance.
El Niños Effect on Algae
The data used in this study are available in one or more of NASA's Earth Science Data Centers. |
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This beach in Santa Cruz, CA was hammered by
large waves throughout the winter of 19971998. The frequent storms along the
coast of California that season were linked to El Niño. (Photograph courtesy U.S.
Geological Survey)
To learn more about El Niño
and La Niña, read the fact
sheets located in the Earth Observatory Library. |