science, health & technology

Also in this section:
The lone psychiatrist in a Third World setting
Two instruments used in the CR-AVE project
STRI social sciences lecture: social inequality needs no market
The La Niña effect

La Niña

When the El Niño effect --- best mesured by warmer than usual temperatures in the middle of the Pacific Ocean --- gets severe, it means droughts for Panama and altered sea currents that affect our fisheries and coral reefs. Droughts from some El Niño years have forced the Panama Canal to limit the drafts that ships can take, causing economic headaches for the shipping world.

Less well known than El Niño, however, is its opposite, La Niña. On this composite satellite map from NASA, the red, white and yellow oceanic areas are hot and the blue and green parts are cool, with the land masses represented in black. It's a relative phenomenon, and this montage is from an earlier La Niña, but this is a typical representation of the waters around Panama in years like these.

What has it meant for Panama? We have had an unusual amount of rain in the dry season, which is good for canal lake levels and hydroelectric power generation, but bad for the campesinos around Aguadulce who produce salt by evaporating seawater in shallow ponds. We have had some unusual colder water currents, which may or may not have something to do with a series of red tide algae blooms along our Pacific coast, which has done serious harm to those who make a living by fishing.

Graphic courtesy of NASA

Also in this section:
The lone psychiatrist in a Third World setting
Two instruments used in the CR-AVE project
STRI social sciences lecture: social inequality needs no market
The La Niña effect