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Climatology

Extremes in the Indian Ocean

Nature volume 401, pages 337–338 (1999)Cite this article

The behaviour of the Pacific and Atlantic Oceans is by no means perfectly predictable, but we have some indications of quasi-periodic oscillations in parameters such as water temperature and rainfall. By contrast the Indian Ocean has been an almost complete enigma in this respect. Papers by Webster et al.1 and Saji et al.2 (pages 356 and 360 of this issue) now furnish evidence of some large-scale interactions between the ocean and atmosphere in the region, and indications of the climatic consequences. But how those regularities may influence or be influenced by other climatic phenomena is far from clear.

This is a topic with a long history. For instance, in 1877 severe drought racked India, Asia and possibly Africa, and resulted in over 20 million estimated deaths from famine and disease3. Such disasters led to attempts to predict the Indian monsoon rainfall, and indeed to the aim of seasonal forecasting in general. One of the greatest proponents of these endeavours was Sir Norman Lockyer, who in addition to his meteorological contributions to science was also co-founder of Nature and its first editor. Lockyer's strategy of linking monsoon rainfall to solar cycles proved to be ill-founded. But he did identify the out-of-phase relationship between pressure in the Indian and eastern Pacific Oceans, and so helped in recognizing the El Niño/Southern Oscillation — the interannual (year-to-year) variation between warm and cold phases in the tropical Pacific.

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Figure 1: Vertical section of the anomalous temperatures along the Equator in the Indian Ocean (left) and Pacific Ocean (right) at the end of October 1997.

References

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  1. European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts, Shinfield Park, Reading, RG2 9AX, UK

    David Anderson

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  1. David Anderson
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Correspondence to David Anderson.

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Anderson, D. Extremes in the Indian Ocean. Nature 401, 337–338 (1999). https://doi.org/10.1038/43807

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