So writes Cesar Caviedes, a University of Florida geographer and climatologist, in his book, "El Niņo In History: Storming Through The Ages."

Published by the University Press of Florida, the book is one of the principal references for an exhibition on the global effects of El Niņo planned for next February at the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, D.C.

"Much has been studied about El Niņo from a strict meteorological perspective, but the book shifts the focus to the impact of El Niņo on the environment and on people," said Caviedes. "It turns out El Niņo has been a lot more important in shaping some historical events than it usually gets credit for."

Caviedes, who has published extensively on El Niņo, said he first began studying the phenomenon's impact on the Pacific coast of South America in the early 1970s, when only a handful of climatologists and geographers were aware of its importance.

El Niņo occurs when winds in the tropical Pacific that normally blow east to west over the equator ease or reverse, causing warming of surface waters in the Eastern Pacific.

El Niņo upsets normal weather patterns worldwide, spurring warmer, wetter winters in the Americas, droughts in parts of Africa and Asia and other climatic anomalies.

Its counterpart, La Niņa, follows an El Niņo event and has the opposite effect, leading, for example, to drier weather on the west coast of the Americas.

Long recognized in South America -- Peruvian fishermen noticed the onset of the phenomenon around Christmas, naming it El Niņo, Spanish for "the Christ Child" -- it was little appreciated outside that continent until the 1980s.

In 1997, one of the strongest El Niņos in recorded history struck. It resulted in widespread floods in South America, destructive storms in California and the Southwest and droughts that caused crop failures and famines in Africa. It was followed by a strong La Niņa in 1999-2000.

Caviedes said the traumatic effects of the 1997 El Niņo are only the most pronounced recent manifestations of how El Niņos or La Niņas have shaped world events.

Although there are reliable meteorological and oceanic records that permit the identification of El Niņo or La Niņa dating back a century or so, Caviedes relied on the work of other scientists and his own investigation to detect the occurrence of El Niņos before then.

He and others have extrapolated those El Niņos based on references or indications of environmental changes resembling those that occur during contemporary El Niņos, leading to what is considered a credible record of past El Niņos and La Niņas dating to the early 1500s.

Caviedes said that when he compared the indicators of past El Niņos with world historical events, he noticed many strong correlations.

For example, 1811 was an El Niņo year that transitioned to a La Niņa 1812. Such transitions are marked in Eastern Europe and Russia by bitterly cold winters, he said.

As it happens, Napoleon's army invaded Russia in 1812, just as winter was setting in. Because of the extreme cold, the results were catastrophic for Napoleon and his troops, with tens of thousands of soldiers dying from exposure, forcing Napoleon into an armistice.

Hitler made the same mistake more than a century later, Caviedes said. His Sixth Army laid siege to Stalingrad starting in late summer 1942, just when the El Niņo of 1940-41 began transitioning into a La Niņa year.

That fall, cloudy weather, rain and snow hindered German air operations while giving Russian ground troops the opportunity to attack, squeezing the Germans into the infamous 40-by-20-mile "cauldron." The Sixth Army surrendered in January 1943, heralding the decline of the entire German army.

Caviedes' book ties El Niņos and La Niņas to numerous other historic events.

For example, the El Niņo-La Niņa transition is known to lead to frequent calving of icebergs in the southern margins of the Arctic. Such was the scenario in the spring of 1912, when the Titanic set out on its doomed voyage.

The abundant snow that Lewis and Clark encountered during their perilous crossing of the Bitterroot mountains, meanwhile, is almost certainly related to the humidity of the Pacific caused by the 1804-1805 El Niņo, Caviedes said.

Although it is too far in the past to confirm, Caviedes speculates that El Niņo may also explain how settlers from Polynesia reached Easter Island, located more than 1,000 miles from the South Sea islands. Pacific currents that normally flow east to west reverse in El Niņo years, which would have enabled the Polynesians to sail east to the island, he said.

[Contact: Cesar Caviedes, Aaron Hoover]

04-Sep-2001