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Buoy oh buoy, look at El Niño
Seattle laboratory the crux of weather-watching network
Friday, February 12, 1999
By TOM PAULSON
Last year's El Niño was one of the strongest on record, causing an estimated 23,000 deaths and $32 billion in damages worldwide, according to the scientists in Seattle who are the planet's top El Niño trackers.
"It was in the category of a super El Niño," said Michael McPhaden, director of a team of scientists at Seattle's Pacific Marine Environmental Laboratory, part of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration complex located at Sand Point.
If El Niño is an atmospheric Al Capone, McPhaden and his weather surveillance team are Elliot Ness and the Untouchables.
The McPhaden lab operates the largest system of ocean-based weather stations in the world, an 8,000-mile long belt of 70 instrumented weather buoys anchored in place along the equator from New Guinea to Panama. The information collected by the buoys is transmitted via satellites to McPhaden's lab.
This flotilla of weather buoys is called the Tropical Atmosphere Ocean array. It was completed in 1994 with the aim of identifying, forecasting and studying El Niño and its sister La Niña, the colder, wetter weather pattern that follows El Niño and which is now soaking the Northwest. The last three months have been Seattle's wettest on record.
Within the last decade, El Niño and to some extent La Niña have become household words. But it wasn't that long ago that scientists couldn't predict -- and sometimes couldn't even recognize -- these powerful and cyclical disruptors of the world's weather.
The term El Niño was coined by Peruvian fishermen who, for more than a hundred years, recognized that every three to seven years something would happen in the Pacific that severely disrupted their fisheries. But scientists have only recently learned how to predict an El Niño.
El Niño is more properly known among scientists as the "Southern Oscillation" -- to reflect both the warming of the Pacific Ocean that signifies an El Niño and the usual rebound of La Niña next year in which the ocean temperature cools dramatically.
Nobody knows exactly what triggers this oscillation, but it can have devastating effects -- creating months of storms and flooding in one part of the globe while leaving other areas in severe heat and drought.
In the early 1980s, an international consortium of scientists collaborated to create the Tropical Ocean Global Atmosphere program. It was aimed at getting a better handle on what was going on with the driving force behind the Earth's weather -- oceans. Understanding El Niño was key to this program.
"We had zero predictive ability back then," McPhaden said.
Many scientists believed satellite observations could be trusted to recognize changes in the ocean, he said, but the El Niño of 1982-83 proved this assumption wrong. An eruption of the Mexican volcano El Chichon sent up enough dust into the atmosphere to alter the satellites' measurements, McPhaden said, so nobody saw the El Niño coming.
"It turned out to be the El Niño of the century, up until this last one," he said. The scientific community knew they needed to do something else or they'd keep getting blindsided by this weather cycle, he said.
It was another scientist at the Seattle NOAA office, Stan Hayes, who suggested the extensive series of weather buoys. At the time, it was a project of such grand scale that most believed it would never be funded.
"It was kind of a revolutionary idea," McPhaden said.
But Hayes persisted and set out a few buoys as a pilot study in the eastern equatorial Pacific in 1984. By 1987, he had 15 buoys and the international scientific community began clamoring for the data.
"That prompted him to shoot for the moon," McPhaden said. Hayes asked for and got funding to establish a system using 70 weather buoys. Each buoy costs about $50,000 and maintenance requires a ship with a crew of 21 who fix and replace buoys as needed across the 8,000-mile course.
"It's like painting the Golden Gate bridge. They start at one end and, by the time they get to the other end, it's time to start over again," he said.
The entire program, which has gone through about 700 buoys to date, operates on an $8 million annual budget, McPhaden said. For an oceanographer, he said, that's big money.
"For a while, the program was living year to year," said Tim Barnett, an oceanographer and climate change researcher at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography in La Jolla, Calif., who helped lobby for the program early on.
"This country has spent billions billions of dollars observing outer space," Barnett said. "This is the first permanent system that even begins to look at the planet we live on."
The weather buoy system is of major importance beyond El Niño, he said. The information obtained about the Pacific Ocean's behavior can help with climate change studies as well.
McPhaden hopes the success in tracking and predicting this El Niño will help him to promote using weather buoys elsewhere on the planet.
He's placed a single buoy study 1,000 miles west of Seattle in the North Pacific and is hoping to get support for placing buoys out there where the ocean's antics directly affect the Pacific Northwest. McPhaden and some international colleagues have also placed a dozen buoys in the equatorial Atlantic Ocean.
Someday, perhaps, he and his colleagues will have buoys all over this watery planet and be able to predict the weather with enough accuracy to help prevent the damage and death that can come from violent changes in climate.
"We're the ones who know how to do it," McPhaden said.
P-I reporter Tom Paulson can be reached at 206-448-8318 or tompaulson@seattle-pi.com
SEATTLE POST-INTELLIGENCER REPORTER 
"Our ability to forecast all this with any degree of accuracy is only a few years old," said McPhaden, who reports on the 1997-98 El Niño in today's Science magazine.
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