YEAR IN REVIEW 1996: EARTH-AND-SPACE-SCIENCES: ...

METEOROLOGY AND CLIMATE: What's Happening to El Nio?? Most of the year-to-year variability in climate in the tropics--and much of it worldwide--is related through a phenomenon called El Nio. The term originally applied to an annual warm ocean current that runs along the coast of Peru about Christmastime; in Spanish, El Nio refers to the Christ child. Today, however, it designates a much larger anomalous ocean warming that stretches westward to the international date line. It is this phenomenon that is linked with the unusual global climate patterns that occur every few years. El Nio is not solely oceanic but couples intimately with an atmospheric component termed the Southern Oscillation. Scientists often refer to the two together as the El Nio-Southern Oscillation, or ENSO. ENSO is a natural phenomenon that appears to have been going on for millennia. Conditions in the tropical Pacific actually are seldom average but, instead, fluctuate irregularly between the warm El Nio phase and a cooling phase, dubbed La Nia. A complete ENSO cycle runs about three to six years, with the most intense El Nio phase lasting about a year. Although no two ENSOs are alike, 11 have been identified since 1950. The warm phase of the most recent cycle persisted from 1990 to mid-1995, a duration unprecedented in the last 114 years of instrumental records--clearly a signal that something very unusual is happening. The stage for an El Nio is set by a distinctive pattern of sea-surface temperatures in the Pacific. Key features include a pool of warm water in the western tropical Pacific and much colder waters in the eastern Pacific. (See Map.) Easterly trade winds pile up the warm waters in the west, while wind-driven surface currents allow cooler nutrient-rich waters to upwell along the Equator and western coasts of the Americas, favouring plankton growth and thus fish. In time the increased convection and rainstorms that tend to occur over warmer waters affect atmospheric heating, which in turn influences the winds. The easterly trades weaken, and the warm waters in the west migrate eastward. This shifts the pattern of tropical rainstorms, further weakening the trades and reinforcing the eastward flow of warm waters. The atmospheric changes, however, are not confined to the tropics. They extend globally and affect the temperate latitudes, typically bringing dryness to some regions and heavy rainfall to others. The effects of an El Nio on society can be large, with losses often overshadowing gains. The oceanic changes can be disastrous for fish and seabirds and thus for the fishing and guano industries along the South American coast. The atmospheric changes act to suppress tropical storms and hurricanes in the tropical Atlantic. Consequently, the return to normal Pacific conditions in mid-1995 unleashed numerous devastating Atlantic tropical storms. Recent research has clarified ENSO's cyclic nature, showing that the moisture content and enormous heat capacity of the ocean make it the flywheel that drives the system through an essentially self-sustained seesawing sequence in which the ocean and atmosphere are never in equilibrium. Tropical warm water is redistributed, depleted, and restored during an ENSO cycle such that much of what is to come is determined by the previous one to two years. Consequently, the future becomes predictable for several seasons in advance. ENSO's recent abnormal behaviour has scientists wondering. Is it a natural variation, or is it related to human activity--in particular, to global warming associated with increases in greenhouse gases in the atmosphere? A computer model using a century of modern ENSO records to simulate cycles for a million years suggests that the 1990-95 El Nio is very unusual and that the climate indeed may be changing in a way that will make such behaviour more likely. Increased greenhouse gases trap more heat in the atmosphere--clearly a potential source of interference with ENSO. What does this mean for the future? Because greenhouse gases are likely to continue increasing, the climate can be expected to continue to change, sometimes in ways unexpected. A challenge for scientists is to capitalize on their improved understanding of ENSO to make seasonal predictions of temperatures, rainfalls, and the way that the risk of extreme conditions varies from year to year. (KEVIN E. TRENBERTH) OCEANOGRAPHY One of the most important themes in oceanography in 1995 was exploration. Some of it was conducted in the traditional mode, from ships, but much was done from Earth-orbiting satellites. Remarkably, satellite radar measurements were able to tell scientists not only about the motion of the ocean's surface waters but also about the shape of the underlying seafloor. Radar measurements of the distance from the satellite to the sea surface provided a picture of the shape of the Earth that was accurate to a few centimetres once the effects of waves and tides had been removed. (A centimetre is about 0.4 in.) Such determinations were possible because the solid material beneath the seafloor gravitationally attracts the water above it in a way that mirrors seafloor topography. For example, the sea surface near a seamount is a few metres farther from the Earth's centre than is the sea surface far from the seamount, and the sea surface over a submarine trench is a few metres closer than is the sea surface far from the trench. (A metre is about 3.3 ft.) Satellite radar easily measures such differences in sea level and thus, in principle, can map the seafloor. The U.S. Navy had made such global satellite radar measurements in the late 1980s, but the data only gradually became available to researchers. In 1995 the last of the data were released and combined with similar radar measurements from other satellites to form a global database. The most exciting result was a map of the global seafloor. Because much of the seafloor previously had been only sparsely surveyed, the new map revealed many new features. The large-scale features of the seafloor continued to be understandable in terms of the theory of plate tectonics, according to which the global seafloor is divided into about a dozen plates of crust that move rigidly away from mid-ocean ridges toward regions of subduction (where one plate is plunging beneath another), such as deep-ocean trenches, or sometimes directly collide with one another. Nevertheless, the new map showed features suggesting that the plates are not entirely rigid but, rather, are compressed or pulled apart as they approach different subduction regions. Because the gravitational attraction of seafloor material depends on how heavy it is, such satellite maps of the seafloor also contained information about the density and temperature of the material underlying the seafloor and thus should aid in understanding of the global distribution of mineral resources on the seafloor. (See Geology and Geochemistry.) The sea surface is not exactly where one would expect to find it solely on the basis of knowledge of the way that seafloor material distorts the Earth's gravity field. The discrepancy is small, generally a few tens of centimetres or less, but it can be determined by a comparison of satellite radar measurements of sea-surface shape with the shape calculated from the very best estimates of the Earth's total gravity field. The difference directly reflects the motion of the water in the upper ocean. For example, because of the rapidly flowing Gulf Stream, the sea surface along the U.S. east coast is about a metre closer to the centre of the Earth than that in the Sargasso Sea. During the year researchers continued to study the circulation of the oceans, using satellite measurements made for the joint U.S.-French Topex/Poseidon project. Launched in 1992, the Topex/Poseidon satellite made radar measurements of sea level along the same geographic track once every 10 days and thus provided a unique view of fluctuations in upper-ocean flow over months, seasons, and years. It could resolve variations in sea level ranging from waves that traverse the tropical ocean over a period of months to sea-level differences between different years associated with the anomalous tropical Pacific Ocean warming known as El Nio. (See Sidebar.) Researchers were also using the satellite to look directly for the slow sea-level rise associated with hypothesized ongoing global warming. Despite the strides in satellite oceanography, more traditional measurements made from ships were needed in order to understand the deep flow of the ocean. The World Ocean Circulation Experiment (WOCE), which began in 1990, was a multinational study of ocean circulation. Many different kinds of measurements were made as part of WOCE, but the central field program around which they were organized was a series of hydrographic transects by ship that traversed the major ocean basins. The central measurements made on each transect were of the temperature and salinity of the water from the top to the bottom of the ocean; they were supplemented by measurements of nutrients and dissolved gases as well as by underwater acoustic profiles of currents below the ship. At the very end of 1994, WOCE researchers began a series of research cruises in the Indian Ocean that continued through 1995. The goals of that work were to learn how deep waters flow into the Indian Ocean from around Antarctica and how they rise and then return southward at shallower depths, to learn how the Indian Ocean contributes to the global transport of heat, and to provide a background picture of the deep flow underlying the surface circulation that was being studied by satellite radar and other techniques. (MYRL C. HENDERSHOTT) This updates the articles ocean; hydrosphere. SPACE EXPLORATION Space station practice missions dominated space news during 1995 as the United States and Russia prepared to start building an international space station that could cost a total of $100 billion through the year 2012. By contrast, unmanned exploration took a turn for the smaller and cheaper as the U.S. initiated a low-cost program for planetary exploration. Meanwhile, NASA faced a drastic downsizing on May 19 when Administrator Daniel Goldin announced a cut of 3,560 civil service jobs and up to 25,300 contractor jobs--30% of the NASA-based workforce--by the year 2000. Goldin also revealed that space shuttle operations would be turned over to a single private contractor.