Synopses & Reviews
Synopsis
El Nino is both a scientific detective story and a fascinating exploration of how weather really works. It brings droughts, mud slides, killer storms, and even epidemics and hordes of frogs and rats. Now for the first time, here is the complete--and fascinating--story of the powerful weather-maker known as El Nino. In this saga of scientists and civilians, murderous storms and ecological shifts, award-winning Time(R) magazine science writer J. Madeline Nash reveals the mysterious sources of El Nino and its farreaching, almost unbelievable effects on the lives of people around the world. The story begins with a warming of the coastal waters that Peruvian fishermen have noted for centuries, and the observations of 19th Century British colonial observers who marked the correlation between famine-causing droughts and drastic changes in wind patterns and barometric pressure. For over a century and a half, scientists and explorers added links of knowledge to a chain of observations that at last created a picture of what they call ENSO: El Nino Southern Oscillation, a picture that contains within it the interplay of wind, water, and geo-thermal forces that violently affects the world's weather. EL Nino's story is filled with human drama, tragedy, and triumph.
Synopsis
In 'El Niano', award-winning science writer J. Madeleine Nash introduces us to the scientists and others whose observations and research have added to our knowledge of this incredible weather phenomenon.