By Scooter Leonard

December 1, 1998

Never was there a more exhilarating time to be a weatherman or a roofer. During the winter of 1997/98, the world was bombarded by news storms, flooded by hype, and spun by marketing hurricanes. With the help of a frenzied media, weather assumed the significance of religion, and El Ni�o became a household name.

Although it's hard to believe, it seems El Ni�o existed before photogenic meteorologists brought it into our living rooms. Scientists agree that El Ni�o's been around for thousands of years, but it's taken a while to figure the wily weather system out. Historical records show an El Ni�o that began in 1567. Peruvian fishermen, who sailed along the westernmost shores of South America, were the first to name the phenomenon.

Typically, the waters they fished were cold, flowing from south to north. However, in some years-every two to seven it turns out-the flow reversed and the waters warmed considerably. The fish food-chain would collapse, and with it the fishermen's livelihood. Because the phenomenon peaked around the Christmas season, the fishermen named the strange weather "El Ni�o," meaning "the Christ Child," or "The Son." It took 500 years for scientists to accept that El Ni�o's effects reached far beyond South America.

The advent of high-speed computers, combined with more rigorous weather study and documentation, precipitated a clearer picture of El Ni�o's effects and a growing ability to predict its occurrence. However, the 1982/83 El Ni�o, the most severe of the twentieth century, wasn't identified until it was half over because it didn't exhibit the typical early warning signs. It wreaked havoc on the planet. After ten-billion dollars in damages, over 2,000 lost lives, massive drought, devastating bushfires, tidal waves, and flash floods, El Ni�o had done more than catch our attention-the brutal weather anomaly became a worldwide foe whose return loomed threateningly on our collective horizon. April 1997. He's back. (Like firemen, meteorologists wake from bed, dress instantly, and slide down a pole into their weather control centers.)

The first predictions initiated among climatologists, scientists, and meteorologists, while surfers in California logged in more spring trunk days than anyone can remember. September 1997. Members of the weather-science community duked it out over the severity of this El Ni�o, while insurance salesmen and roofers got in on the action. By mid December, debate surrounding El Ni�o succumbed to the real thing. Abnormal temperatures were recorded all over the globe. Small towns held emergency meetings to plan for the possible devastation, people in mudslide-prone areas sandbagged around the clock, and snowboarders combed shops for an El Ni�o wax. Along with the astronomical hype, El Ni�o created some all too real effects. Over the next few months, human powerlessness against weather was made painfully clear. We could only sit back and watch as ABC and CNN brought us the apocalypse in nightly increments. Faithfully, a bushy-mustached, perma-grinned man used the latest weather-tech visuals and elaborate hand motions to show what El Ni�o was up to and where he might strike next. Weather public-relations officials possessed an endless supply of calamity footage from around the planet, giving us the weather like never before.

Though I knew everything would be fine where I lived, one can never be too careful, so I constructed, as I suspect many of you did, an El Ni�o shelter. I also created my own El Ni�o warning device that monitored atmospheric vibrational fluctuations and the eating habits of flying squirrels. Weather affects us all in different ways, and with aberrant storms passing overhead, you never knew what might happen from one day to the next. The stock market continued to do well, but no doubt more than one smooth-talking trader lost his silicon-enhanced date to a Rogaine-using, nouveau-riche flood-insurance salesman. And the human realm was not the only one thrown out of whack. The animal world went completely berserk: in an unprecedented attack, a pod of killer whales (one member of which was unofficially identified as Willy) killed a sperm whale near the Farallon Islands off San Francisco. More disturbing than that-many dogs, including miniature daschunds, showed a waning interest in chasing cats and often looked to the sky with puzzled expressions on their faces.

Needless to say, for several months the world was not as we typically knew it. And although my croquet game dwindled to its worst in months, I felt ecstatic. My home mountains in California got the best of El Ni�o's fallout. Friends in Tahoe gave up counting powder days, finding it easier to number their non-powder days. Snowboarders in New Mexico rode more early season days and ate hotter chiles than at any time in recent history. And remarkably, Southern California resorts actually offered more than a park to ride. Some resorts enjoyed their best year ever. Alyeska resort in Alaska had 902 inches of snow, 38 percent up from normal, and El Ni�o blanketed California's Mt. Shasta with over 600 inches of snow. It was Shangri-la for some, but unfortunately, like that poor sperm whale, not everyone was happily spelling El Ni�o in the their morning bowl of Alpha Bits. El Ni�o's power includes bending the jet stream, and that he did. The winter came late, and for some, not at all. Early season left Utah and Colorado riders cursing El Ni�o with every P-tex stick they lit, but thanks to a barrage of late-season snow, they ended up with near-average totals. Other regions weren't saved. The Midwest suffered a dismal snow year-not a single flake fell during the entire month of February. Shanty Creek, Michigan had a yearly snowfall total of only 78 inches, 61 percent below their 200-inch average. In Idaho, the situation was even worse; Schweitzer Mountain saw only 52 inches of snow, down 70 percent from normal. I'm surprised we haven't seen stickers with El Ni�o and a line through it on American trucks in some of the smaller towns across the Midwest, or Montana and Idaho for that matter. May 1998.

The hype subsided. But not before a guy named Al Nino enjoyed his fifteen minutes of fame, and a new minor-league badminton team, El Segundo El Ni�o, was born. While the immediate weather anomalies diminished, the effects would last indefinitely. We saw more allergies, more snake bites, more bad- hair days, and the possible emergence of Los Mosquitos. Occurrences of spontaneous combustion were way higher than normal, as were UFO sightings, but in a small town in Texas, life went on as normal. Just as it eclipsed presidential sex scandals, O.J., and the Mars landing, so did El Ni�o drop from the media spotlight. But not with what I had anticipated-a genetic breakthrough or a new Leonardo DiCaprio movie-it was replaced instead by the possible presence of La Ni�a, El Ni�o's powerful sister. Hurricanes have names, weather cycles like El Ni�o and La Ni�a are widely-known, and we seem to be on a roll with the whole weather thing.

Before you know it, we'll have rain-shower Fred and heat-wave Wilma, and jet-stream Jerry or Jill-depending on which way it bends. Every weather occurrence will be named, plotted, and hyped. So despite what kind of winter you had this past season, you can thank El Ni�o for taking our relationship with weather (and resort marketing ploys) to a whole new level. In the future, when we live in bubbles filled with our own manufactured and controlled weather, I'm sure we'll miss the old El Ni�o mania. -Scooter Leonard (a.k.a. Bolt Lightning, Esq.)