El Niño not the only cause of local storms

Don't tell University meteorology students that the area's current warm weather spell was "caused" by El Niño. They will either laugh or fume, depending on their mood.

"It's pretty much a joke around here," said Brian Davey (senior-meteorology).

- Evan Bookbinder (junior-meteorology)

With the overload of media coverage, El Niño has been reduced to a joke nearly everywhere. Whenever the news media report that California storms or general weather trends were caused by El Niño, meteorology students and professors grimace at the phenomenon's misrepresentation.

El Niño does not "cause" any specific storms, they caution; it simply increases the likelihood of certain weather patterns.

"People make it seem like it's a monster, but it's just warm water," said Evan Bookbinder (junior-meteorology).

Yet while El Niño has become a taboo phrase in some parts of the meteorology department, some meteorology professors have used the phenomenon's arrival to study its effects.

The overall effect of El Niño, which is a shift in the water circulation in the Pacific Ocean, is difficult to pin down for State College, said Greg Forbes, associate professor of meteorology, who is studying the El Niño's effects on the area.

Forbes said El Niño tends to amplify upper air patterns, causing general trends throughout Pennsylvania -- which are sometimes unreliable. In most El Niño years, he said, temperatures in December and January have been 1 to 3 degrees higher than normal, but they lag slightly below normal in May.

Precipitation in central Pennsylvania is largely unaffected, Forbes said. Drawing from eight historical El Niños, Forbes has found that precipitation in western Pennsylvania is lower than normal, but higher than normal in the southeast. State College is about normal, he said.

But, he stressed, El Niño's overall impact on Pennsylvania is weak.

"Most of the time, the signal isn't consistent," he said. Even in California, which feels the strongest impact from El Niño, there is little certainty, he said.

"It's like calculating the stock market," he said. "You won't be right every time."

Gregory Jenkins, assistant professor of meteorology, studies the long-term impact of El Niño-influenced trends on the Susquehanna River Basin, which encompasses most of Pennsylvania, including State College.

Jenkins and a group of colleagues will present a paper on the subject this weekend to the American Association for the Advancement of Science in Philadelphia, where President Clinton will also speak.

Jenkins said in El Niño years, whatever snow has fallen often melts before spring, depriving rivers of additional water important to farm land. This effect may be intensified when combined with possible global warming effects in the future, he said.

Such long-term predictions are the most important results of El Niño research, useful to businesses that are most strongly affected by the weather, said William Frank, professor of tropical meteorology. But in Pennsylvania -- thousands of miles from El Niño -- any correlation is very indirect, he said.

"You can't just look at a storm and say, 'This was caused by El Niño,' " he said.