Media coverage of the 1997/98 tropical ocean warming event made the term "El Niņo" a household word. So pervasive was coverage of El Niņo that it became the fodder of late night talk show monologues and an oft-invoked gremlin responsible for many of society’s ailments. As a fisheries biologist studying climate impacts on marine resources, I followed the event very closely and created an El Niņo WWW site¹ in the spring of 1997 when the magnitude of the event was becoming obvious.

As part of my daily routine in updating the web page, I began tracking El Niņo media coverage over the Internet. Between June 1997 and July 1998, I accumulated links to stories about El Niņo. In searching for El Niņo stories, I attempted to maintain a constant level of effort so that the number of stories accurately reflected the level of coverage given the event as it progressed. In fisheries lingo, this is known as a Catch Per Unit Effort (CPUE) index. Because Internet content is often removed after a period of time, a retrospective accumulation of daily stories would not yield as accurate a count as the contemporary CPUE index I maintained.

In general, I spent half an hour a day, Monday through Friday, searching for and linking to El Niņo stories. By July 1997, several of the larger newspaper and media sites had developed dedicated El Niņo web sites. These included CNN, MSNBC, USA Today, ABC News, San Diego Daily Tribune, San Francisco Gate (combined site for both the Examiner and the Chronicle), Orange County Register, Los Angeles Times and Environmental Network News. El Niņo articles published by other media sources were found using two search engines: Yahoo! and HotBot. Yahoo! is perhaps the largest organizer of content on the WWW and established a Headlines page² in July 1997. HotBot³ was recently deemed to index the largest percent of Internet content among the major World Wide Web search engines⁴. Both Yahoo! and Hotbot are updated several times daily. Stories published by wire services (e.g., Reuters, AP) were only counted once and, to qualify, a story had to be about – rather than a passing reference to – El Niņo. Academic and government sites were excluded from search results and only English language stories were indexed.

The time series of the number of stories I found each month closely parallels the Southern Oscillation Index (SOI)⁵during the period of study. The number of stories I indexed rose steadily from 5 in June 1997 to a high of 136 in February of 1998 and then decreased steadily to 31 in June 1998. The greatest discrepancy between the SOI and my mass media index occurred in January 1998 when the number of stories actually decreased from December (72 to 62) before doubling in February. The total number of stories indexed during the 14 months was 719. The number of unique sources for the stories was 101, and included such diverse publications as Africa News Online, Golf Week and Women’s Wire. The greatest number of stories was published by CNN (122) followed by the Los Angeles Times (94).

The subject matter of the articles was highly varied and changed steadily as the event progressed. Early stories focused on predictions that the 1997/98 event would likely challenge the 1982/83 event as the strongest in modern history. By October stories started appearing on preparations being undertaken to minimize the impact of El Niņo fueled storms along with estimates of the potential worldwide damage in dollars. In November and December, stories about actual impacts – speculatively linked to El Niņo – dominated the stories. Impacts ranged from the fires in Indonesia to floods in South America to impacts on Pacific Ocean biota such a fish and birds. There was somewhat of a lull in January with a number of stories suggesting that the El Niņo event was waning. In February, however, the number of stories skyrocketed as the southwest and southeast US both experienced record amounts of rainfall with widespread flooding and damage. In March, reports started appearing on the financial damage resulting from El Niņo storms along with stories about the accuracy of El Niņo forecasts several months before the onset of the event. Reports in May about the decline in size of the warm pool were quickly followed by June stories about an impending La Niņa event. The number of Internet stories increased again in July 1998 as more media coverage was devoted to La Niņa. Much of the interest in La Niņa was spurred by the NCAR-sponsored La Niņa summit⁶ held July15-17, 1998.

One feature of the mass media coverage of the El Niņo event that amused climatologists and others familiar with the mechanics and climate impacts of El Niņo was the sensationalist nature of some of the story headlines. A few of the more humorous (and not necessarily inaccurate) include the following:
 
 
 
 

• El Niņo: Four seasons in one day (The Press (New Zealand), 9 August 1997)
• Cloudy, chance of annihilation (tongue in cheek article, New York Times, 16 September 1997)
• El Niņo could cause havoc for Great Lakes (Environmental Network News, 28 October 1997)
• El Niņo ravages sea turtles (ABC News, 13 November 1997)
• Rain got you down? El Niņo has Californians bumming out (San Francisco Chronicle, 1 February 1998)
• El Niņo attacks California (ABC News, 23 February 1998)
• El Niņo's Cruelty Rains on Central, E. Africa (Washington Post, 2 March 1998)
• Hey dude! El Niņo spawns outrageous waves (CNN, 15 March 1998)
• El Niņo's Reign Might Be Over (Los Angeles Times, 19 April 1998)
• Crews retake beaches from El Niņo (Los Angeles Times, 24 April 1998)
• Heartbreak of El Niņo's wrath visited upon parks (San Jose Mercury News, 2 May 1998)
• El Niņo refuses to let California go (MSNBC, 13 May 1998)
• El Niņo Takes a Large Gulp out of the Panama Canal (Christian Science Monitor, 15 May 1998)
• Attack of the bugs - Warm winter has wrought a 'swarm' spring, summer (USA Today, 25 May 1998)
• Adios, El Niņo - It's Time to Bid This Temperamental Baby 'Bye-Bye' (Los Angeles Times, 30 May 1998)
• La Niņa gets ornery (US News 27 July 1998)
• El Niņo even has Cuba on the ropes (MSNBC, 30 July 1998)

As the old saying goes – "Everybody talks about the weather, but nobody does anything about it." Thanks to the mass media coverage of the 1997 El Niņo event people are speaking more knowledgeably not only about the weather but about what factors influence the weather we experience. As for doing anything about El Niņo, the scientific community enjoyed its greatest success in forecasting this event’s timing and impacts several months before they actually occurred. With all that free advertisement it is quite likely that additional funding will be provided to study El Niņo and related phenomenon such as the recently identified El Niņo-like decadal climate variability. For the sake of marine populations impacted by climate variability I hope some of that funding is for directed ecosystem research.
 

Footnotes
¹ http://www.iphc.washington.edu/PAGES/IPHC/Staff/hare/html/1997ENSO/1997ENSO.html
² http://headlines.yahoo.com/Full_Coverage/Tech/El_Nino/
³ http://www.hotbot.com
⁴ Lawrence, S. and C. L. Gles.  1998.  Searching the World Wide Web.  Science 280: 98-100.
⁵ Values for the SOI obtained from http://nic.fb4.noaa.gov/data/cddb/
⁶ Details of the summit can be viewed at http://www.dir.ucar.edu/esig/lanina/
 
 

Fig.1. A mass media index of the Internet coverage given the 1997/98 El Niņo event plotted against the Southern Oscillation Index (SOI, values prior to June 1998 multiplied by –1).