The term “El Niño” originally applied to an annual
weak warm ocean current that ran southward along the
coast of Peru and Ecuador about Christmastime
(hence Niño, Spanish for “the boy Christ-child”) and
only subsequently became associated with the unusually
large warmings that occur every few years and
change the local and regional ecology. The coastal
warming, however, is often associated with a much
more extensive anomalous ocean warming to the international
date line, and it is this Pacific basinwide
phenomenon that forms the link with the anomalous