Troublesome El Nino Officially Gone

El Nino--the little kid who caused so much trouble--is gone.

Blamed for last year’s unusually wet weather in Southern California, catastrophic floods in the Midwest and punishing droughts in Australia, the puzzling weather phenomenon named for an innocent child has finally come to an end, the National Weather Service says.

Forecasters say that should mean a gradual return to normal weather conditions--good news for Laguna Beach, but even better news for Malibu, where residents learned the hard way last month that unusually heavy rains on slopes stripped of vegetation during last fall’s brush fires could mean an onslaught of destructive mudslides.

“It appears that El Nino has ended,” Alan Basist, a meteorologist with the National Weather Service’s Climate Analysis Center in Silver Spring, Md., said Monday. “It apparently happened in December.”

What occurred then, he said, is that equatorial trade winds in the southern Pacific resumed their customary strong flow from east to west.

For more than a year--and perhaps as long as three years--these winds had been abnormally light, even flowing at times in the opposite direction, from west to east. Pushed by these unusual westerly winds, large bodies of warm water that normally circulate near Australia had drifted slowly east in what is called a Kelvin wave, pooling off the west coast of Peru.

Coastal residents called the phenomenon El Nino, naming it for the Christ child because the storms it spawned were first observed around Christmastime.