Weather project may unravel El Nino mystery

Press, 7 January 1987, Page 2

Weather project may unravel El Nino mystery

PA Sydney International experiments off the north coast of Australia that aim to improve weather forecasting may help unravel one of the world’s great climatic mysteries, El Nino, scientists said.

The five-week long project launched in Sydney this week is one of the world’s largest meteorological experiments into tropical weather patterns. The experiments, involving co-operation between Australian, Chinese and United States scientists, will investigate the tropical atmosphere, and look in detail at tropical thunderstorms, which in the Darwin region are some of the largest and highest in the world. Scientists also hope the experiments will help understanding of El Nino, the warming of Pacific Ocean currents, which has. contributed to disastrous droughts in Australia and many other parts of the world. The experiments were launched in Sydney with the release of a weather balloon from the Chinese research vessel Xiangyanghong 5 (Red Sun 5), which with 170 scientists and crew will be stationed in the Gulf of Carpentaria for five weeks. The ship has spent the last two weeks in Sydney being fitted out for the experiments.

Dr Michael Manton, chief scientist from the Bureau of Meteorology Research Centre in Melbourne, said the experiment was aimed at improved weather forecasting.

The $500,000 ($640,000) Australian Monsoon Experiment (Amex) being conducted by the Bureau and Monash University will study tropical thunderstorms and wet season atmospheric movements.

Dr Manton said the major industries in the north such as mining, offshore oil» and gas, and fishing could all be disrupted severely by tropical cyclones. “The tropics earn 40 per cent of Australia’s export earnings and a significant fraction is from industries which are weather-sensitive,” Dr Manton said.

Amex would collect data from radar at Weipa,

Gove and Darwin as well as from balloons released four times a day at 13 ground stations. Complementary data is expected to be gathered in two American experiments: Emex (Equatorial Mesoscale Experiment) and the NASA-sponsored S.T.E.P. (StratosphereTroposphere Exchange Project). Dr Peter Webster, from Pennsylvania State University, said Emex aimed to understand the explosive heating of the atmosphere which occurred in the northern part of Australia. Scientists term the region the Earth’s “boiler box” and it is critical to global weather fluctuations.

S.T.E.P. will study the transfer of gases and particles between earth and the upper atmosphere and will help assess the effects of human activities on the ozone layer.