Product Description
This up-to-date and comprehensive electronic book on CD-ROM provides vital information on the important changes in tropical Pacific Ocean sea surface temperatures known as El Niño and La Niña. The cycle of warm and cold conditions is called the El Nino/Southern Oscillation (ENSO). This great collection of documents, reports, and publications provides a comprehensive overview of this phenomena, with research material from various organizations within the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) and NASA. There is extensive historical material on observed cycles in recent decades, with information on the climate effects globally and for the United States. Material includes science background, climate associations, historical ENSO, research topics, references, glossary, FAQ, and impact on current climate. Effects on droughts, floods, hurricanes, and abnormal temperature extremes are explored.

El Niño is a disruption of the ocean-atmosphere system in the tropical Pacific having important consequences for weather around the globe. La Niña is characterized by unusually cold ocean temperatures in the Equatorial Pacific, compared to El Niño, which is characterized by unusually warm ocean temperatures in the Equatorial Pacific. Among the consequences of El Nino are increased rainfall across the southern tier of the US and in Peru, which has caused destructive flooding, and drought in the West Pacific, sometimes associated with devastating brush fires in Australia. Observations of conditions in the tropical Pacific are considered essential for the prediction of short term (a few months to 1 year) climate variations. To provide necessary data, NOAA operates a network of buoys which measure temperature, currents and winds in the equatorial band. These buoys daily transmit data which are available to researchers and forecasters around the world in real time. In normal, non-El Niño conditions, the trade winds blow towards the west across the tropical Pacific. These winds pile up warm surface water in the west Pacific, so that the sea surface is about 1/2 meter higher at Indonesia than at Ecuador. The sea surface temperature is about 8 degrees C higher in the west, with cool temperatures off South America, due to an upwelling of cold water from deeper levels. This cold water is nutrient-rich, supporting high levels of primary productivity, diverse marine ecosystems, and major fisheries. Rainfall is found in rising air over the warmest water, and the east Pacific is relatively dry. The observations at 110 W show that the cool water is within 50m of the surface. During El Niño, the trade winds relax in the central and western Pacific leading to a depression of the thermocline in the eastern Pacific, and an elevation of the thermocline in the west. The observations at 110W show, for example, that during 1982-1983, the 17-degree isotherm dropped to about 150m depth. This reduced the efficiency of upwelling to cool the suface and cut off the supply of nutrient rich thermocline water to the euphotic zone. The result was a rise in sea surface temperature and a drastic decline in primary productivity, the latter of which adversely affected higher trophic levels of the food chain, including commercial fisheries in this region.

In all, this CD-ROM has over 18,000 pages reproduced using Adobe Acrobat PDF software - allowing direct viewing on Windows and Apple Macintosh systems. Reader software is included on the CD.

Our news and educational discs are privately compiled collections of official public domain U.S. government files and documents - they are not produced by the federal government. They are designed to provide a convenient user-friendly reference work, utilizing the benefits of the Adobe Acrobat format to uniformly present thousands of pages that can be rapidly reviewed, searched by finding specific words, or printed without untold hours of tedious research and downloading. Vast archives of important public domain gover