The latest evidence of El Nino on the Web is at www.elnino.org. "It's Coming," the screen is titled, along with a headline: "The Future Global Web Site of ElNino.org." Salinas entrepreneur Bruce Armour created the site in September, and plans on adding El Nino links and weather forecasts in the next week or so. Although his background is advertising and radio, not meteorology, he hopes to get the National Weather Service to help provide content.

Another new El Nino site, www.elnino.com, focuses on El Nino's impact on California. Launched last week, it is owned by the "San Diego Daily Transcript," a business newspaper, with much of the content provided by the Scripps Institution of Oceanography at UC-San Diego. Like a lot of the sites, Elnino.com has news clippings about the effects of El Nino, including "San Diego Roofers Not Fiddling Around Business Way Up," and "Ziebart Offers Tips for Winter Vehicle Preparation."

Many of the sites provide reasonably lucid explanations of the weather phenomenon, including the "El Nino Online Meteorology Guide" <ww2010.atmos.uiuc.edu/(Gh)/guides/mtr/eln/home.rxml>. Put out by the Department of Atmospheric Sciences at the University of Illinois, it has such basic information as that El Nino is Spanish for "the male child" (other sources say "Christ child"), and initially referred to a weak, warm ocean current that appeared each Christmas season along the coast of Ecuador and Peru. There is also a La Nina (female child), which is unusually cold sea surface temperatures that occurs about half as often as El Nino, the last being in 1995-96.

Pacific trade winds generally drive surface waters west, warming them. El Nino occurs when the easterly trade winds weaken, allowing the warmer waters of the western Pacific to move east to the South American Coast, replacing the cool nutrient-rich sea water with a warmer water depleted of nutrients, resulting in dramatic reductions in fish and plant life.

Every three to seven years there is a stronger El Nino that sometimes has major economic and environmental consequences worldwide. In the 50 or so years they have been keeping more accurate records, there have been 10 major El Nino events, the strongest previous being in 1982-83, which wreaked a lot of havoc along California's coastline, and is the source for much of this year's concern. This year's El Nino mania began this spring, when instrument buoys placed off the coast of Peru after the 1982-83 El Nino picked up the highest sea temperatures ever recorded there.

A site with El Nino predictions about California is "El Nino and California Precipitation" <tornado.sfsu.edu/geosciences/elnino.html>, put out by professors John Monteverdi and Jan Null of the Department of Geosciences at San Francisco State University. Noting that media reports this summer predicted a "spectacularly wet winter" for California, it forecasts "greater than normal" precipitation, but nothing of Noah's Arc proportions. It adds that, "not all flooding events in California occur during El Nino years, and not all El Nino years produce widespread flooding."

The site also lets you view a Quicktime movie of global sea temperatures from NASA showing the progression from a La Nina last November to the current El Nino conditions, which looks like a fast-motion acne attack.

The website of the masters of disasters, the Federal Emergency Management Agency <www.fema.gov/nwz97/elnino.htm>, has El Nino survival tips including buying flood insurance, moving valuables, appliances, electric panels and utility meters to upper floors, having a family disaster supply kit in your home and car, and having "plenty of spare cash."

The site also has information on the Oct. 14 El Nino Community Preparedness Summit FEMA held in Santa Monica, which focused on ways to prepare for El Nino. FEMA broadcast the summit live over the Internet, and has archived sound bites at its website. With RealAudio software, you can hear El Nino comments from such stirring speakers as FEMA Director James Witt and Vice President Al Gore.

Other informative El Nino sites include the National Weather Service's San Francisco Bay Area El Nino Page <nws.mbay.net/elnino.html>, and the Center for Ocean-Atmospheric Prediction Studies Library <www.coaps.fsu.edu/lib/elninolinks>, which has links to several El Nino newspaper cartoons.