Will it, won't it

Will it, won't it

this year, throughout the world, the warm Pacific ocean current of El Corriente del Nio - "Current of the Christ Child" - popularly known as El Nio, has triggered off fears of bad agricultural yields, hurricanes, floods and droughts. Weather experts predict that crop yields in Australia and Asia, particularly China and India, will be adversely affected by this warm current as it may result in untimely monsoons. However, Indian weather experts adamantly say that nothing of the sort will happen. N Sen Roy, director general of the Indian Meteorological Department ( imd ) says: "Despite what the prophets of gloom in the west are predicting, our observations from meteorological centres across the country indicate a normal monsoon."

El Nio is a warm Pacific current that rises near the Peruvian coast. It raises the water temperatures off the coast of South America and is known to disrupt weather patterns worldwide. This year, the rise in temperature has been to the tune of nearly 4 c . As the water warms up, the air above it gets warmer and rises higher in the atmosphere. The descending leg of this air falls around Africa and parts of South Asia, inhibiting cloud formation and affecting monsoon patterns in the subcontinent.

Weather experts in other countries are left with little doubt that the present El Nio could reach proportions of devastation of 1982-83 El Nio that caused severe drought in Australia. The Australian Bureau of Meteorology says that the rainfall pattern over much of southern Australia has been significantly below average. "In terms of warming of the water, it is on a par with the 1982-83 pattern," says Tom Spencer, head of the climate observing system for the World Meteorological Organisation. Climatologists in Australia have predicted that the drought could blight this year's wheat harvest, resulting in a drop of 10 to 40 per cent below last year's bumper crop. China also fears a severe drought in its northeast and central parts.

In India, El Nio has caused more controversy than apprehension. Officials at the imd said that the department had taken El Nio into account while making the monsoon forecast. However, Richard Grove, professor of environmental history at the Australian National University who has been conducting research on El Nio, disagrees. In a recent interview with Down To Earth , Grove said: "There is no argument about the Indian monsoon being related to the El Nio. The Indian monsoon fails when you get a strong El Nio. You can demonstrate that historically. The biggest famines in Indian history we know about are all 100 per cent associated with the El Nio effect."

imd officials insist that the amount and distribution of rainfall in the current monsoon have been normal so far. According to Sen Roy, 29 of the country's 35 meteorological sub-divisions have received normal or excess rainfall. Most of the other regions have suffered only a marginal deficiency that could be made up as the season progresses. He explained that the weather systems are too complex with far too many variables involved for a simplistic reading of weather to come. "There is no one-to-one correlation between El Nio and the state of the monsoons. The monsoon's fundamentals are very strong," he said. Sen Roy questions the authority of foreign experts, saying that their predictions are "based on factors other than scientific."
The Union ministry of agriculture has dispatched contingency crop plans to various states, suggesting measures to deal with aberrations like a prolonged dry spell in the middle of the season or early withdrawal of the monsoon. This suggests that the government is aware of the repercussions of El Nio. "My intuition is that the monsoon is going to fail towards the end of the season. So I am not taking any chances and have already started preparing to face the situation," says Chaturanan Mishra, the Union agriculture minister.

Though us climatologists have warned that a severe El Nio factor could badly affect the monsoon, Vasant Gowarikar - the creator of the 16-parameter monsoon model in India - rejects this opinion. According to him, El Nio is just one of the parameters taken into account while preparing a long range forecast by the Indian monsoon model. He believes us scientists have been consistently wrong for several years in predicting the Indian monsoon. The imd has predicted 92 per cent of normal precipitation this year.