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== =El Niño~ __Questions: What exactly is the El Nino? How does it effect the global climate? Is it responsible for the recent snow storm in Greeley. CO?__=
 * __Answers__**: To put it simply, the El Nino is an unusual change in winds throughout the Pacific Ocean. This change in trade winds shows up every 3-10 years and effects weather throughout the world; but to fully understand what happens during the El Nino, you must first understand what happens during years __without__ it. When trade winds are acting normally, they do their part in carrying warm air from the east to west Pacific Ocean. As a result, warm surface water is accumulated toward the west, making the area both warm and damp. With the trade winds moving in this direction, cold water from lower levels of the eastern Pacific Ocean rise to the surface and is close to 8 degrees C lower than the western Pacific waters. This uprising cold water is helpful in supporting high levels of productivity, as well as major fisheries and marine ecosystems. In contrast, the western waters recieve a lot of rainfall due to the spreading warm water, but do not support the same productivity as the east. These normal temperatures help to regulate weather throughout other areas including the area the you live in.

During an El Nino season, trade winds in the Pacific slow to effect both the east and west Pacific, and the effects of this may even end up in your backyard. As the normally active trade winds relax and minimize over the central and western Pacific, the eastern areas are taken by surprise becuase the water stays warm, meaning a depression of the thermocline and loss in productivity. In other words, cold water from the bottom is not brought to the top by movement of surface water and many organisms are not able to live with the unusual temperature. This loss even effects higher levels of the food chain including commercial fisheries. In the western and central regions, water temperature is effected in the opposite way and is much cooler than the usual, non El-Nino years. Scientists have followed many more effects that the El Nino has on our climate and changes in weather can be traced far from the tropical Pacific, even to Greeley, CO where we experienced heavy snow in the month of December. This long chain of cause and effect has led to hurricanes and floods, as well as tornados and wildfires.

Video!!
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You may also be wondering how the name El Nino came to be. Well as the story goes, it was orginally named by a fisherman off the coast of South America as he noticed the obvious warm water in the Pacific Ocean, occuring near the end of the year. This just happened to be around the Christmas season and the man chose the name, El Nino which in spanish means "the little boy" or "chirst child".

=__Vocabulary to Know__= ==
 * __Trade winds-__** any of the nearly constant easterly winds that dominate most of the tropics and subtropics throughout the world, blowing mainly from the northeast in the Northern Hemisphere, and from the southeast in the Southern Hemisphere.


 * __La Nina-__** A cooling of the ocean surface off the western coast of South America, occurring periodically every 4 to 12 years and affecting Pacific and other weather patterns.


 * __Ecosystems-__** A community of organisms together with their physical environment, viewed as a system of interacting and interdependent relationships and including such processes as the flow of energy through trophic levels and the cycling of chemical elements and compounds through living and nonliving components of the system.


 * __Thermocline-__** layer of water in an ocean or certain lakes, where the temperature gradient is greater than that of the warmer layer above and the colder layer below.