SAN DIEGO (AP) - While this year's powerful El Niño rains misery worldwide, it has blessed scientists with a laboratory for improving their understanding - and ability to predict - long-term climate trends. And scientists say El Niño's angry skies are creating just the right climate to keep much-needed research dollars flowing.
The ocean-warming phenomenon, the most watched and weighed ever, already has verified forecasts issued last summer when meteorologists warned that torrential winter rains could torment California and southern states.
``This event is the first time that the scientific community and National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration ... have gone public with the forecasts - at considerable risk - in an area where we don't have that much past experience,'' said John Wallace, an atmospheric scientist at the University of Washington in Seattle.
Had their predictions fizzled, so, too, might their funding and credibility. But, so far, with Texas, Mississippi, Louisiana, Florida, the Carolinas and parts of California soaked and the Northern states having a mild winter, most of the continental forecast is playing out. Successful predictions ``give more confidence in the money that's going to research,'' says Lisa Goddard, a climate research scientist at the University of California, San Diego's Scripps Institution of Oceanography.
During the periodic phenomenon called El Niño, westward blowing trade winds weaken and allow a mass of warm water to expand eastward across the tropical Pacific Ocean to South America. The warm waters are like an engine, feeding heat into the atmosphere, disrupting atmospheric circulation and worldwide weather.
The result has ranged from drought in Indonesia and northern South America and below-normal rainfall in parts of southern Africa to flooding in central-east Africa, northern Peru, Chile and southeastern South America.
El Niño science begins with instruments placed in the ocean and on satellites. About 70 buoys stationed in the Pacific measure sea temperature. Satellites bounce radar off the ocean surface to measure its height and the depth of its warmer upper layer. Other satellites take sea surface temperature readings. And commercial ships are used to drop temperature sensors.
In La Jolla, the 1,090-foot-long (330-meter-long) Scripps Pier is an integral part of the institution's laboratory. Climatologist Laurence G. Riddle, wearing a ``Blame It On El Niño'' T-shirt, climbs atop a gray clapboard shack to point out instruments monitoring temperature, humidity and wind. Inside the shack, he lifts a wooden hatch with a view of the waves lapping below, where scientists lower tubes to analyze the water. Radar measures sea surface height.
Back in their offices, meteorologists use computers to compile and translate data about this El Nino and its predecessors. Other climate scientists feed wind and wave data into supercomputer models.
Riddle said San Diego rainfall hit a milestone on Feb. 17. The 10 inches that had fallen since the official "water year" started Oct. 1 exceeded the annual average and put San Diego ahead of its rainfall in the great El Nino winter of 1982-83.