For four months in late 1992 and early '93, Townsville was the nerve center of the Coupled Ocean-Atmosphere Response Experiment (COARE), the most detailed and comprehensive field study of the tropical ocean-atmosphere system ever conducted. It directly involved hundreds of scientists, students, technicians, ship and aircraft crews, and support people from 20 nations. COARE was a highly focused field research component of the decade-long international Tropical Ocean Global Atmosphere (TOGA) climate study. TOGA is part of a long-term scientific effort to learn how tropical oceans and global atmosphere interact to produce climate variations on time scales of seasons to years. The goal of TOGA is to understand this coupled system well enough to predict regional climate variations months to years in advance. Such an understanding also promises to be helpful for improving models and projections of long-term climate change.

       Why is short-term climate prediction important? Although long-term climate changes such as global warming have been the focus of a great deal of attention from the media and the public as well as the scientific community, a more immediate and pressing problem for many of the people of our planet is short-term climate variation. Hundreds of millions of people in Africa and Asia practice subsistence farming, depending on each year's harvest to feed their families for the next year. When drought brings crop failure, many die from malnutrition and starvation. Too much rain can be as deadly as too little; when the south Asian summer monsoon brings heavier-than-normal rainfall to densely populated, low-lying areas such as the coastal regions of India and Bangladesh, thousands lose their homes, their crops, and, often, their lives. The causes of these fluctuations in climate from season to season and year to year are not well understood, so they cannot be predicted accurately. By the time they are in progress, however, it usually is too late to do anything to protect the lives, property, and various human enterprises that they threaten.

       El Nino