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The Trackers:
The world trains its eyes and instruments on the El Niño of '97
The science of tracking El Niño has come a long way since Spanish fishermen began recording crude weather observations from Peru in the 15th century.
The first hint of this year's El Niño appeared in March when weather buoys detected a rise in temperature in waters off the coast of Peru. Closer analysis of the data prompted the National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) Climate Predictions Center to issue an El Niño advisory in April.
Thus began the most comprehensive gathering of information ever on this capricious climate event. Across the globe, government agencies and independent research centers have been compiling data and running it in sophisticated computer models.
"It's clearly the most observed El Niño ever," said Dr. Michael Glantz, of the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, Colorado.
By land, air and sea
At the center of efforts to understand El Niño is NOAA's Tropical Atmosphere Ocean Array, a network of 70 buoys in the Pacific Ocean that measure surface winds, air temperature, relative humidity and ocean temperatures. Additional buoys set along the equator measure ocean currents and rainfall.
In a separate effort, the TOPEX-Poseidon satellite, managed by NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, is mapping ocean heights every 10 days. The maps, created by bouncing radar signals off the surface of the ocean, are tracking a growing mass of warm water associated with El Niño.
In another project, NASA's Microwave Limb Sounder experiment, originally designed to look at the depletion of ozone in the atmosphere, is documenting excess water vapor.
Ships criss-crossing the globe are taking oceanographic and atmospheric measurements on a volunteer basis and depositing floating buoys to gather additional data. In the laboratories, scientists are combing through historical climatological information to aid in forecasting.
Collaborative effort
The data gathered by satellite, air and sea is shared by international research centers, which generate computer models to document El Niño and develop long-term forecasts.
The federally funded International Research Institute for Climate Prediction, a joint project of Columbia University's Lamont-Doherty Observatory and Scripps Institution of Oceanography in California that opened in April, is studying El Niño on an international level.
Having successfully predicted the arrival of El Niño for the first time in history, scientists are determined not to be taken off guard again as they were when El Niño caused an estimated $13 billion in damage in the early 1980s.
"The 1982-83 event really took climatologists by surprise," said Stephanie Kenitzer, a spokeswoman for the National Weather Service. "Over 15 years we've come a long way to understanding it."
But Glantz says researchers still don't know enough. "We keep thinking we understand it ... only to have the next (El Niño) tell us we didn't really understand."
CNN Interactive Writer Liza Kaufman Hogan and The Associated Press contributed to this report.
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