EXPERIENCE has taught us that attempts to predict the weather far ahead in any meaningful way will be frustrated by chance or chaos. Until now, that is. If research published this week is correct, the arrival of the massive upheaval in Pacific weather patterns called El Niño is predictable up to two years in advance.
Dake Chen and colleagues from the Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory at Columbia University, New York, trained their predictive model on observations from the past 20 years, and then successfully “hindcasted” every El Niño for the past 148 years. Using nothing but historical records of sea-surface…
