El Nino

If you're a Marylander and you love snow, you'll want to listen to AccuWeather.com's chief meteorologist, Joe Bastardi. If he's right, Maryland is in for the coldest, snowiest winter we've seen since the memorable - and snow-choked - winter of 2002-2003. But if you can barely tolerate the slippery, icy, sloppy stuff, maybe the winter forecast from the National Weather Service's Climate Prediction Center will sound better to you. Its forecasters expect a colder-than-average winter in the Mid-Atlantic states, but they're less confident about whether whatever falls from the sky will be snow or rain.

Ted Lingelbach in Parkville asks how a developing El Nino event in the Pacific will affect this hurricane season. El Nino conditions have already figured into forecasts of an average to slightly quieter-than-average Atlantic storm season. But El Ninos also tend to increase the chances for snowstorms of 8 inches or more in Baltimore. We could be in for some real snow, at last.

Forecasts of snow may send people running to supermarkets for bread and toilet paper. But some scientists want their predictions to provoke a different reaction -- spurring health officials to prevent disease outbreaks and save lives. Assaf Anyamba, a research scientist at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County and the Goddard Earth Sciences and Technology Center, warned officials in Kenya last fall that weather conditions were ripe for an outbreak of Rift Valley Fever, or RVF, a lethal disease transmitted by mosquitoes.

FORT LAUNDERALE, Fla. -- Don't expect another easy hurricane season, tropical weather specialist William Gray said yesterday. He and his associate Phil Klotzbach predict 14 named storms in 2007, including seven hurricanes, with three of them intense. Chances are almost two in three that a major hurricane with winds greater than 110 mph will slam into the U.S. coast, they said. That would be more active than the average year, which sees 11 named storms, including six hurricanes, two intense.

ORLANDO, Fla. -- The global weather bully El Nino is waking up but might not have enough strength for another several weeks to swat the life out of hurricanes. "By then the hurricane season is pretty much over with," said Vernon Kousky, a research meteorologist at the national Climate Prediction Center in Maryland. But that's not the only reason to watch out for the birth of an El Nino. The weather pattern generally brings wetter, cooler winters to the Southeast, meaning powerful thunderstorms could afflict Florida this fall, winter and spring.

Hold on to your ski cap, baby. Just a few weeks into winter, the Baltimore area has received more than half of its average annual snowfall. And meteorologists who have studied El Nino winters past say the worst may be yet to come. "I'd keep my snow shovel and ice melt handy," said meteorologist Jim Travers at the National Weather Service's Sterling, Va., forecast office. After the warmth of last winter, the talk of snow has come as a relief to some area ski resorts and businesses -- as well as drought-stricken area reservoirs.

Call it El Ninito, or the little El Nino. Pacific waters are warming by a couple of degrees off the coast of Ecuador, which means this winter's vacation plans will be touched by the effects of a mild to moderate El Nino. You could get winter rain where you don't want rain -- in Florida, for example. Snow might not show up where you do want it, including places like northern Michigan. But fewer hurricanes than usual will smack the Caribbean this fall. That's good, because island resorts usually offer great fall bargains.

For as long as they can remember, the people of the high Andean river valleys of Peru have endured recurring waves of a deadly and disfiguring disease called bartonellosis. It is always present in their villages. But every four to six years, they suffer a "bad year" - a mysterious surge in the number of cases and severity of the illness. Victims develop a fever and flu-like symptoms, followed by anemia that kills 40 percent to 60 percent of its victims if untreated. Months later, those who survive develop a terrible rash they call verruga - bleeding warts, all over the body, that last two to five months.

The dry weather that has dogged Maryland's farmers for the past three summers seems likely to persist into the next one, according to one of the federal government's top forecasters.Ants Leetmaa, director of the National Weather Service's Climate Prediction Center, said the temperature patterns in the Pacific Ocean that set the region up for last summer's drought are continuing.Leetmaa said that although scientists aren't as confident about their long-range spring and summer forecasts as they are of their fall and winter predictions, "the likelihood of drought for the eastern half of the country is pretty good."

Safety at sea is a major concern for anyone who travels coastlines or oceans under power or sail, and the prudent voyager plans carefully before leaving the docks and keeps an eye to the weather once under way.But Ralph Naranjo, head of the sailing center at the Naval Academy, said this week that over the past few years El Nino and La Nina have altered standard weather patterns, and offshore racers and cruisers should be aware of the changes and adapt."