THE 1918/19 EL NINO

An ocean model forced with winds from an atmospheric reanalysis of the first half of the twentieth century has reveled that the 1918/19 El Niño was very strong. A lack of ocean observations from the central equatorial pacific during the first half of the twentieth century has limited efforts to determine the strength of El Niño prior to the late 1950's. The ocean model is based ob the Parallel Ocean Program (POP) software. Many El Niño events are thought to be initiated by intense mesoscale convective events in the western equatorial Pacific known as the westerly wind bursts. The model results reveal that the El Nin ̃ o event in the beginning of the twentieth century was comparable in magnitude to the strong events in 1982/83 and 1997/98.