Winter 1997-98, USA...
What is it? The name of some stray dog? A rather nasty season worker's shot based on Tequila?

In 1997, El Nino hit the news stateside big time. Everything, including the failure of certain US sports teams was blamed on it. It was responsible for billions of dollars of damage around the Pacific. How? What's that got to do with my skiing?

This is where it gets boring. El Nino is a big pool of warm water that shifts its way across the Pacific every 4 to 7 years after a sudden shift in the trade winds. Great you say. Warm skinny dipping in Baja california. Wrong.

Fishy, very fishy
It was the South american anchovy fisheries that noticed it first (although the local fishers had known it for years). A complete breakdown of the fisheries around December (hence “El Nino“ - the little christ child). The reason being that the warm waters move coastwards and cap off the upwelling of lovely cold nutritious waters that make the fisheries so abundant. No upwelling - No fish.

That's just fish you say. Well. Not quite. You see the arrival of that warm water off California spells bad news. And this is where the skiiing comes in. Storms that come in off the Pacific have three things of interest. One is strength, another is direction, the last is frequency. In a normal winter storms come in a manageable strength, in roughly the same tracks, and of an average number in a season.

Winds of change
El Nino changes all that. The warm water energises storms lining up in the pacific and creates more of them. All that warmth converts to carrying capacity and power. Bad news for the Southwest USA. Storm after storm means floods and floods and floods. All they need is one big earthquake (not unlikely) and they'd be in serious trouble. What about the snow then. Well, there's the good news. More storms, loaded with more water, means more snow. For some resorts that is. Because El Nino moves the storm tracks about, then some areas actually dry up.

What schadenfreud though, to cheer for great snow, when Tijuana is about to be washed into the Pacific again. I had the misfortune of being in San Diego (ironically attending a conference on El Nino) during the last one, fun. The coast waters were brown and people in Mexico were being washed out to sea. Hollywood homes were being destroyed in landslides. Then I moved inland, and was suddenly surrounded by news of unusual unseasonal tornado conditions.On the other side of the Pacific in Indonesia and Australia forest fires were raging Not nice at all.

But hey, the californian desert flowers bloomed, and the smog cleared from L.A.! Oh, and they surfed the biggest waves ever in competition in Baja last El Nino! What shows already this year is the abundance of snow in the US. Some resorts are opening ahead of schedule.

Europe undecided, business as usual then...
So what about Europe? Well, sadly, we're not sure. The connections of world weather patterns are mysterious and buried in a myriad of climatological info. There are some weak connections, but unlike the US, we can't predict what the entire winter will be like. Also, like El Nino, the Atlantic has it's own version. Of course not being American, it's not as big and obvious, but as far as our weather goes, it means more.

We call it the Northern Atlantic Oscillation (NAO). It runs every 2-3 years and affects the direction of storm tracks over Europe. Everyone working the last few seasons knows all to well how storms either go north over France or south over Italy. That's NAO at work. It affects temperatures too, even more important for snow conditions. So great, what's the hitch? Well, here's the gutting bit. We can only at the moment work out after the winter which state the NAO was in. Ho hum. There is hope though. When we've worked out how it all happens, then we'll be able to give a winter long snow prediction...wahey.

So where does that leave us poor European skiiers? Seaweed and fircones I guess (I won't condone any sacrifices though)...

BTW - if anyone's going to Canada, then it'sanother story altogether : they have a 20 year cycle on top of El Nino that complicates the whole story. B.C. should be similarly affected to California though. We're nearly there on working that one out. And before anyone cries global warming, it's been going on for thousands of years...in fact, the earliest known skiiers were about at around the same time as some people think it all began. Spooky eh!

Have a great season all.

Report from Alastair Vaan - Natives Resort Reporter

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