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CNN Live At Daybreak

Explaining El Nino

Aired March 08, 2002 - 05:52   ET

THIS IS A RUSH TRANSCRIPT. THIS COPY MAY NOT BE IN ITS FINAL FORM AND MAY BE UPDATED.

THIS IS A RUSH TRANSCRIPT. THIS COPY MAY NOT BE IN ITS FINAL FORM AND MAY BE UPDATED.
CAROL COSTELLO, CNN ANCHOR: For more on El Nino, Chad Myers is here with the whole world in your hands.

CHAD MYERS, CNN METEOROLOGIST: It's going to be hard to do more. Ann did a great job with that story.

I just want people to know what El Nino is and why we talk about it. Some people think it's with the ozone layer, I mean there's all kinds of explanations. The explanation -- the scientific explanation is that the wind changes directions in the Pacific Ocean just a little bit. Most of the time the winds are just kind of going one way or going the other.

I have a globe here and here's North America. I want you to get a globe. And if you don't have one, they're not expensive anymore. They used to be like $70, now you can get them for like 9 bucks.

Take a look at how big the Pacific Ocean is. Here's North America, here's California and here is Japan. It's almost half of the globe this Pacific Ocean out here. So what El Nino is, is that when the winds begin to blow from west to east ever so slightly, we're talking one or two miles per hour, you take the very top layer, the warmest layer, the layer that the sun warms and you blow it toward North American, also South America, obviously right along the equator, and you start to blow this warm air to this direction.

My dry erase marker is drying out so that's why they call it dry erase.

Anyway, this whole area back out here to the west to this -- from all the way from Mexico all the way down to Peru will get warm water because the warm water piles up on that side of the globe. It doesn't pile up on this side of the globe. If the weather was going this way, if the wind was going this way, then the warm water would be here. But in fact, the warm water with El Nino is here.

And when we call it La Nina, the girl, that means the wind has been blowing the other way and there's cold water here. That's what we had the last couple of years, or at least a small area of La Nina.

And El Nino is all the way from Mexico and this warm water, that's why we divert the jet stream a little bit, we get fewer Atlantic hurricanes which is good news for folks in Florida, although many folks think that we need some good tropical storms to get some moisture here in the southeast, otherwise the west, it's a very big up in the air. California, you can get huge storms, you can also get nothing. And then back here into the southeast, all the way from Texas on up into the Carolinas, it does look like a very wet winter.

COSTELLO: And the wind only increases two miles per hour.

MYERS: Just a little bit. It just changes direction.

Think about this, take like just a whole bowl of sugar and blow on the top. And that top layer of sugar, just those top grains will blow the one way that you're blowing them and takes the warm air and blows it this direction.

COSTELLO: Wow!

MYERS: It happens about every seven years. It's a cycle.

COSTELLO: Well thank you, that made us understand a lot better.

MYERS: And it would have been better if my dry erase marker didn't dry out.

COSTELLO: It worked out just fine.

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