El Nino is a boy child with a very bold streak

Country Living with Francis Farragher

Sometimes the more you read about weather the more confusing it can become. Phrases like global warming, the Jet Stream and El Nino, are now almost part of the daily jargon about weather and of course they do all have a scientific grounding but at times a little learning can really be a dangerous thing.

El Nino is the buzz phrase with a lot of the scientists and meteorologists around the world as over recent months we have experienced a pretty extreme version of the weather phenomenon that that takes its name from the Christ child or boy child. So what is this thing called El Nino and what are its causes.

Well it happens about every two to seven years and when El Nino arrives, it tends to cause havoc to weather patterns across the world. Quite simply, El Nino is a warming of the waters along the Eastern Pacific bordering onto the West Coast of South America and it’s caused by a change in wind direction.

More often than not, the trade winds just below the Equator come from from the east and out to sea but not always. At the time of an El Nino the wind direction changes from East to West and a warm body of ocean water is blown slowly towards the east coast of South America.

I have to admit that what happens next is quite beyond me but this rather subtle enough change in wind direction and ocean temperatures triggers off a whole chain reaction in our world weather patterns than can bring extremes of floods, drought, storms and heat, depending on what part of the globe you’re in.

El Nino is not a product of global warming – its impact was noted and recorded centuries back by Peruvian fishermen in the 1600s – as their fishing patterns were impacted on by the warmer currents. Scientists now say it’s a phenomenon that’s been in place for thousands of years.

In tandem though with the global warming impact, it does throw in another bit of heat into our already hotter world. The UK Met. Office however makes the point that El Nino does impact significantly on our weather patterns and probably has contributed to our wet, windy but very mild winter just gone by. Like most things though about weather though, it’s far from an exact science.

The peak of El Nino was towards the end of last year, and according to the BBC, one of the Spring legacies from this phenomenon could be an extended cold spell through the early to mid-spring period, pretty much the type of weather that we’re experiencing at present. Their thinking on this is that at the peak of El Nino – over the last few months – wet and windy conditions tend to prevail over the UK and Ireland, but as it subsides – which it is doing now –  a more settled but colder patterns will follow.