El Niño

Article Title: Understanding El Niño

Author: Jonah Bromwich

Source: http://www.nytimes.com/2015/12/17/science/understanding-el-nino.html?_r=0

Date: December 16, 2015

Project by: Claudia Coolidge

Have you ever been curious of why our weather has been so warm recently? The weather may be acting differently because of the phenomenon El Niño. El Niño, which is Spanish for “the boy,” is named after Christ because of how the weather changes are seen around Christmas time. It is a weather phenomenon that changes the normal weather pattern world wide. El Niño occurs every two to seven years, lasting typically 12 months.This phenomenon happens because the Pacific trade winds that usually blow from east to west stop doing so. During El Niño the weather reverses; meteorologists still don’t fully understand why. Places in the Pacific Coast of South America have a lot of rain, and Australia and South Asia have droughts instead of rain. The paths of other winds are as well altered causing places like California to have rain when they usually experience droughts. El Niño is believed to have been happening for thousands of years.

El Niño is affecting our society majorly right now. Since the weather is so different it affects people’s daily lives so much. People who are used to cold weather are now experiencing warm, and those who are used to droughts are having floods. The weather is so different that the way people usually live is changed. One limitation in the science right now is no one fully understands when El Niño will occur and what effects it will produce. After reading this article I, like many others, wished we fully understood why El Niño occurs so we could better predict the weather to come.

I first became curious about El Niño when I noticed how different the weather was this winter. That’s when I asked my dad why we were experiencing such warm weather. He then told me it was because of El Niño. This instantly interested me to figure out what El Niño was. I wanted to fully understand why we were having such nice weather. After looking through a bunch of different articles (for other topics) I remembered how much El Niño fascinated me. I then made a decision to do El Niño as my current event. Once I found the article I read through it extremely carefully highlighting important facts. I mostly learned all about what El Niño is because before the article I had very little knowledge of what it was. I think that this article came from a reliable source that I agree with. The article as well helped show what El Niño is without making it too confusing to understand.