El Nino

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Asked to describe this Pacific weather phenomenon, most surfers will respond, "Who cares how it happens? The water gets warmer and the surf goes off."

True enough, the El Nino pattern often ups the sea's degrees, while sending massive, consistent pulses of swell to the West Coast, but like the Santa Ana Winds that hollow out incoming swells even as they're fueling destructive blazes, this kid's one menacing bugger to the tune of floods, droughts and brush fires.

El Nino is a disruption of the ocean atmosphere system in the tropical Pacific, typically occurring once every three to seven years. The pattern's first sign is a slackening of the usual easterly trade winds in the central and western Pacific, winds that upwell the colder waters off South America and send them toward Indonesia and Australia. Radical shifts in the locations of the area's high and low pressure systems, a peculiar thingy called "southern oscillation," make for a "counter current," sending the South Pacific's warm pool east to South America where it parks off the coast for anywhere from six to 12 months. The persistent rains so key to sustaining the tropical fauna in Indonesia and parts of Australia migrate with the warmer water, inundating Peru, Ecuador, Columbia, etc., as they leave their homelands dried up and primed for fire.

Elsewhere around the globe, El Nino years bring heavy snowfalls, banner crops, unthinkable humidity and, as is the case along the West Coast of the United States, epic surf. For all their degrees and satellite gizmos, scientists, who've studied the event since the mid-'20s, remain hazy on why the pattern's influence ranges from Santa Barbara to Siberia.

While a southerly shift in the jet stream crossing the north Pacific is often cited, meteorologists generally chalk the chaos up to "teleconnections," an intentionally vague theory that translates to "when one thing is messed up, everything else gets messed up, too."

Despite being one huge bastard, the term El Nino is actually Spanish for "the little boy" or, to the devout, "Christ child." It was first coined by Peruvians who noticed that the phenomenon tended to kick in around Christmas time as they were preparing to celebrate a fairly famous birth.

Meteorology and religion aside, El Nino has graced the West Coast with heroic surf conditions a number of times over the past 50 years, most notably during the winters of 1957-'58, 1969-'70, 1982-'83 and 1997-'98, all of which serve as measuring sticks for hugeness and consistency and, consequently, coastal wreckage (houses wash away, houses slide down hills, piers collapse, roads collapse).

While December of 1969's monster swell is still referred to as the mother of them all (20-foot Rincon, they'll tell ya) and this past El Nino got much ink courtesy of some high-profile go-outs at Maverick's, the pattern of 1982-'83 was in fact the largest, longest and most relentless of these weather phenoms in the past 100 years. Mansions in Malibu still tremble at the mention of that beast.

With his Catholic origins, El Nino's one of many kids. His most famous if polar opposite sibling, La Nina, sometimes but not always occurs post-Nino, when cold water built up in the equatorial Pacific expands across east the ocean, icing beyond normal South America's coastal seas. Strong easterly trade winds ensure upwelling galore for roughly the same duration as El Nino. Whereas El Nino grants the Pacific Northwest a warmer winter, La Nina cools the coast down significantly but pushes typical seasonal rains away from the southwest and southeast.

Sure, it's confusing as hell, but for our purposes, just remember these characteristics of El Nino: the water gets warmer and the surf goes off. -- Greg Heller, October 2000