It also led to severe droughts and bush fires in Indonesia and Brazil. Europe escaped the more violent consequences of El Ni o, but we still saw some pretty unusual weather. The Centre is funded by the national weather services of 18 European countries. It promoted acceptance that El Ni o has a global effect on the world's weather. In addition, wind velocity and humidity are measured and transmitted three times per day.
Buoys remain in position for up to a year before being recovered and refurbished.
The Centre already had a fully operational atmospheric model that could make accurate 10-day global forecasts, but they had no ocean model for the Pacific. This system had everything they needed and the two groups quickly established collaboration. The deeper the colour, the more severe the effect. The floods in China and along the Pacific Coast from the US to South America, the very dry conditions in Indonesia and Brasil, as well as the warm winter over Europe were all clearly predicted. The raw data was fed into the model and the predictions that it made were compared to the actual global weather patterns that are a matter of record.