Local disruption or global condition? El Niño as weather and as climate phenomenon

Abstract

El Niño denotes a periodical warm water stream in the Pacific Ocean. But who knew about this phenomenon, where and how? El Niño ‘the boy’ emerged as a fabric of local experiences and stories of extreme weather events: tropical winter storms, floods, droughts and famines in the coastal states of South America, Indonesia and Southeast Asia. In the Northern Hemisphere this rich cultural history went largely unnoticed. Only in the 1980s and 1990s did El Niño acquire global recognition as an effect of the oceanic and atmospheric currents in the tropical Pacific region. As the oceans moved from a marginal to a central position in the discourse on the Earth's climate cycles, ENSO – the ‘El Niño Southern Oscillation’ – became part of a global climate pattern. This paper explores El Niño ‘the boy’ and ENSO El Niño Southern Oscillation as juxtaposed and superposed environmental perceptions. While El Niño the boy conveyed horrific weather experiences on the human scale, ENSO became known through terrific scientific views of Earth from space. Earth observation by remote sensing satellites collected vast arrays of local measurements into new data fabrics. Studying the case of the US–French orbital satellite mission of TOPEX/Poseidon, this paper examines both the imagery from satellite data and the forecasting efforts preceding the strong El Niño winter of 1997–8. From the data and image sets of remote sensing satellites, recurring local disruptions emerged as a periodic global climate condition. Local experiences of El Niño and scientific perceptions of ENSO as a global climate cycle did not translate easily into each other. The paper discusses some of the epistemological tensions across spatial scales. While El Niño's shift from exception to regularity fed into the framing of ‘climate change’ as a global disaster, the emerging ENSO regime obscured disaster locally.