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 Indepth
review of the naming of El Nino
"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.
| 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 |
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