A warm patch of water off Peru impacts Indian farms. Discover how El Niño connects global weather patterns through the quirky genius of mathematician Gilbert Walker and his Indian collaborators.
How can a patch of warm water thousands of kilometres from India determine whether its farms flourish or fail? And how did a mathematician help uncover one of the greatest hidden connections in the planet’s weather?
In the first episode of this three-part story, we trace the strange history of El Niño and the centuries-long struggle to predict the Indian monsoon. The journey begins off the coast of Peru, where fishermen gave a deceptively tender name—the Christ Child—to warm waters that devastated their rich fisheries.
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From there, we travel to nineteenth-century India, where catastrophic famines made forecasting the monsoon a matter of life and death. Early meteorologists chased sunspots and elusive cycles, while an Australian astronomer glimpsed something extraordinary: droughts thousands of kilometres apart seemed to occur in step.
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The breakthrough came with Gilbert Walker, an eccentric Cambridge mathematician fascinated by birds, flutes, ice-skating and boomerangs. With the painstaking calculations of Indian clerks—including the remarkable Hem Raj—Walker uncovered a vast atmospheric seesaw across the Pacific: the Southern Oscillation.
NOTE – This article was originally published in thehindu and can be viewed here
