Part 1: El Niño: How a Warm Patch of Pacific Water Came to Rule India’s Monsoon | The Rearview Podcast
This podcast episode explores the historical discovery of the El Niño phenomenon and its impact on the Indian monsoon. It details how mathematicians and meteorologists identified the atmospheric connection between Pacific water temperatures and Indian weather patterns.
Why it matters
Understanding these climate patterns is critical for agricultural planning and food security in India.
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.
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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