The Oceanographic and Meteorological Event of El Niño
My account, 1997 on the Ecuadorian coast. 

I have to go back to what I witnessed in the beautiful 
city of Bahía de Caráquez 26 years ago. It is when one of 
the strongest El Niño events on record hit us, which was 
the 1997/1998 with intense rains in the area, never 
seen before and also that closed us with the earthquake 
of magnitude 7.1 on the Richter scale. I had dedicated 
myself to working as a hotel and incoming tourism operator 
since 1994 and these two natural events left us with less 
than 1% of the visitors we had received during the next 
three years. 
That was a tremendous setback that happily passed at the time but 
unfortunately returned with the devastating magnitude 7.8 
earthquake of April 16, 2016. That will be another story.

This story begins on November 26, 1997. I was sitting on 
the Malecón, waiting for a pizza at Donatello's restaurant, 
[near where Puerto Amistad is now and near where the 
longest bridge in Ecuador that connects Bahía and 
San Vicente, but almost 13 years before its construction 
(it was inaugurated in October 2010). When it suddenly 
started to rain, the first heavy downpours of the El Niño 
of 1997 – 1998. I remember the date because the next day
I had an expedition with some friends, professional divers, 
to a site that I wanted to explore about  5 km offshore 
in open ocean in front of Bahia. Here I had found 
underwater construction-type walls, approximately 20 
years earlier, at the site called Los Bajos de Santa Marta. 
If you are interested in seeing any of my projects, a team 
of divers from the local university made a nice video of
 the expeditions (in Spanish): 
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VP9a9GhW4FU.

Returning to El Niño, an important point must be clarified,
before it was called a “phenomenon”, now it is called an 
“event”, because it is known that this event of climatic 
origin has always existed over the years. The name of 
El Niño is due to the association of this event with 
the so-called El Niño current (the warm current of Panama, 
reported by fishermen from the coasts of Ecuador and Peru,
who observed that the waters increased their temperature 
during the Christmas season. Here they realized that 
the large schools of fish disappeared from the surface
of the sea and moved to deep waters, surely looking 
for nutrients from the Humboldt current that brought 
them their food. The cold and dense water of the Humboldt
current was manifested but at great depths. Normally 
when it arrives in the summer this cold current has an 
upwelling effect bringing the cold water to the surface.

The first official records of the phenomenon were reported by sailors and travelers. For example, closely related to the year 1891 and 1892, the Peruvian captain Camilo Carrillo in 1892 noticed the existence of a warm ocean current on the normally cold coasts of Peru and according to (Busiek, J. 2015) at the beginning of 1891, a traveler named S.M. Scott was staying near Talara, in northwestern Peru, recalling in a letter he wrote 34 years later how shocking it was to see clouds begin to form on the horizon:

“a low, thickly cloudy sky, intense heat, high humidity and an oily sea, so it began... The rain fell in inconceivable torrents for weeks... after dark, the sea burst in phosphorescent lightning along the coast ... If the sea was full of wonders, the land was even more so... the desert became a garden". He described "huge man-eating sharks" typical of the warm waters of Panama, bananas, coconuts, and snakes carried by the current, swarms of unknown insects in the air, and a parade of spiders entering his home (Busiek, J. 2015).

There are other interesting events associated with the most intense El Niño years. I found this on Wikipedia that between 1789 and 1793, the British historian Richard Grove reports that several observers of the time reported serious droughts in Asia, Australia, Mexico and southern Africa, for which reason it is suspected that this phenomenon could have caused the famine. that preceded the French Revolution. More recently, the meteorologist Jacob Bjerknes postulated in 1969 that El Niño is normally related to the Southern Oscillation, since a physical relationship is present between the phase of anomalous high pressure in the western Pacific with the phase of infrequent warming of the eastern Pacific, which is accompanied by a weakening of the trade winds from the east.

The Pacific coast of Ecuador does not suffer from hurricanes or tornadoes, which is one of the reasons why many North American sailboats from the Caribbean and Central America come to our beautiful port of Bahía de Caráquez and stay here for months. Your instruments are affected by all the electrical storms in those areas, damage that is, of course, aggravated by moisture. With our green season and our dry season, and with the influence of the warm Panama current (sometimes referred to as the El Niño current, since it arrives around Christmas time) and the cold Humboldt current, we have perfect weather year round. whole. We actually experienced what was formerly known as the El Niño Phenomenon, now called the El Niño-Southern Oscillation (ENSO) event or warm phase of the equatorial Pacific weather pattern as that scientists have understood that in reality this has been occurring with a certain periodicity over time.

This is how this afternoon in November 1997, when the rain from a North storm of almost 4 hours stopped, the streets on the bay side were flooded. This was a premonition of what was to come. The US Department of National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) said the following: “Earth's climate is dynamic and varies naturally on time scales across seasons, decades, centuries, and longer periods of time. Each “up and down” fluctuation can lead to warmer or cooler conditions, wetter or drier conditions, with more or more inactive storms. Analyzes of climate records of decades or longer periods of time and studies based on climate models suggest that many of the changes in recent decades can be attributed to human actions: these trends in decades are called climate change. The effects of climate variability and change ripple throughout the environment and society – touching, in fact, almost all aspects of human activities and the environment. Perhaps the best-understood occurrence of climate variability is the naturally occurring phenomenon known as the El Niño Southern Oscillation (ENSO), an ocean-atmosphere interaction over the tropical Pacific Ocean that has major consequences for climate in all the planet. The ENSO cycle is characterized by strong and consistent variations in ocean surface temperatures, rainfall, air pressure, and atmospheric circulation throughout the equatorial Pacific. El Niño refers to the warm phase of the cycle, in which above-average sea surface temperatures develop in the eastern central tropical Pacific. La Niña is the cold phase of the ENSO cycle. Source: ENSO Cycle: Recent Evolution, Current Status and Predictions

The El Niño event of 1997 – 1998 was the strongest in recorded history. The damage to Ecuador was estimated at 2.8 billion dollars, 4 times more than that of 1982 – 1983. It was reported that the lives of seven million people in Ecuador had been altered in one way or another due to this extensive event. oceanic and atmospheric. The province of Manabí (where Bahía is located) was the most affected and due to some sort of current and atmospheric specificities, Bahía de Caráquez was the hardest hit city on the entire Ecuadorian coast. I think it was one of the most impacted by El Niño on the entire eastern coast of the Americas. The words “we have nothing, we have lost our house, our farmland and a family member” were heard frequently.

This El Niño came to us announcing thru bio-indicators that it was coming. What biological indicators were these? The thousands of seabirds that migrated to Peru looking for their food. It is known by the authorities of Peru that the anchoveta migrated to more than 120 meters deep, already making this unreachable for the diving of the Peruvian Boobies, Guanay Cormorant and other species, which can dive a maximum of 6 to 10m from the surface. Only in the month of May and June, according to data from the Ministry of Environment and Water, 8,000 dead specimens are known. They are machismo but almost certainly. For example, in the Bahía de Caráquez area, fishermen had never seen the southern cormorant from Peru (Cormoran guanay).

We always hope that the Humboldt current can do its job and especially cool the coastal profile of Ecuador. But today we have winter conditions on the beach, little wind and concern to start preparing for what we can mitigate, since it may be that a bad boy is only in his childhood stage. This event is currently projected to be a moderate to strong El Niño, the concern is that 40% of all the world's seas are overheated, will that have any consequences for the development of El Niño?