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El Nino: The
Name and its Meaning "El
Niņo" means different things to different people. In Spanish, el niņo means
small boy or child. In capital letters, 'El Niņo' refers to Jesus as an infant. To
Peruvians, it has an additional meaning which is the focus of this site: a particular
intermittent warm ocean current that moves southward along its coast. It received this
name at some before the beginning of the 20th century. The popular contemporary
version of how it got its name refers to the fact that warm water appears off the coast of
Peru seasonally, beginning around Christmas time, id est during the summer in the
Southern Hemisphere which is the Northern Hemisphere winter.
Michael H. Glantz has provided
this marvelous definition of El Niņo which will be used throughout this site.
| El Niņo \’el ne’ nyo noun
[Spanish]\ 1: The Christ Child 2: the name given by Peruvian sailors to a seasonal, warm
southward-moving current along the Peruvian coast <la corriente del niņo> 3: name
given to the occasional return of unusually warm water in the normally cold water
[upwelling] region along the Peruvian coast, disrupting local fish and bird populations 4:
name given to a Pacific basin-wide increase in both sea surface temperatures in the
central and/or eastern equatorial Pacific Ocean and in sea level atmospheric pressure in
the western Pacific (Southern Oscillation) 5: used interchangeably with ENSO (El
Niņo-Southern Oscillation), which describes the basin-wide changes in air-sea interaction
in the equatorial Pacific region 6: ENSO warm event synonym warm event antonym
SEE La Nina \ [Spanish] \ the young girl; cold event; ENSO cold event; non-El Niņo year;
anti-El Niņo or anti-ENSO (pejorative); El Viejo \ ‘el vya ho \ noun
[Spanish] \ the old man [M.
H. Glantz] |
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