EL NINO

Have you ever experience rain for about a week none stop? Well in the year of nineteen ninety seven El Niño hit on the pacific coast. El Nino is a change in wind direction and with that change there is rain. El Niño is very different from La Niña, which hits over in the East Asia. Well my experience I was in first grade and El Niño hit in the winter.  Being the Best on the Beach Elementary it was not that year. The classes that were at sea level reached about a foot of depth. Those classes were for the sixth graders and fifth graders. That whole week or two they had wet classrooms. Through out the school the carpet only got soaked. Other than the school, the city of Newport Beach the water reached the sidewalks. My mother at that time had a Honda Civic so it felt like we were driving in the ocean. Being that El Niño is rain, that season it happened it would be raining a whole day and then stop for awhile. As several people dislike the rain, El Niño has been a favorite memory for me. School during El Niño was not that much fun because recess was spent playing board games and I did that at home.

El Niño is distinguished by unusually warm ocean temperatures in the Equatorial Pacific. El Niño is an oscillation of the ocean-atmosphere system in the tropical Pacific having important consequences for weather around the globe. Some consequences are increased rainfalls across the south of the US. Trade winds blow towards the west across the tropical Pacific. These winds pile up warm surface water in the west Pacific. The temperature of the sea is about 8 degrees C higher in the west, with cool temperatures off South America. Rainfall is found in rising air over the warmest water, and the east Pacific is relatively dry. During El Niño, the trade winds relax in the central and western Pacific leading to a depression of the thermo cline in the eastern Pacific, and an elevation of the thermo cline in the west. The eastward displacement of the atmospheric heat source overlaying the warmest water results in large changes in the global atmospheric circulation, which in turn force changes in weather in regions far removed from the tropical Pacific.