El Niño is a Wandering Son

SeattleP-I.com has a cool story aboutwarm-ocean El Niño patterns migrating over history.

Thanks to a study led by Julian Sachs, a UW associate professor of oceanography, scientists tracked rainfall from 1400 to 1850 at four Pacific islands, and found, in scientific-ese: "that the Pacific intertropical convergence zone was south of its modern position for most of the past millennium, by as much as 500 km during the Little Ice Age."

Though El Niño's appearances seems to correlate with solar radiation peaks and valleys, global warming could amplify its wandering feet: Sach says it could hike as much as 75 miles north by the end of this century. Not good news for anyone depending on El Niño's rain buckets for drinking water.