"Lower Central America, Panama and northern South America are locked in the grip of a 1016 mb extension of the huge, clockwise (i.e. from the east) high pressure cell (1024 mb) over the Atlantic, the so- called Bermuda High. With that on top of us, we will not get convective rain. Three low pressure systems crossing North America (giving snow and rain) have distorted this mass of dry air (the Bermuda High) so that the air circulation is producing winds blowing almost directly FROM the east to the west. Only as they strike Central America do they change their vector and appear to come from the north. (The classical Northeast Trade Wind). This great dry air mass has *moved* (the earth did most of the movement in its seasonal tilt around the sun) southward replacing the low pressure belt (The INTERTROPICAL Convergence Zone) of rising air and therefore raining . Today, the northernmost extension of the rising and rainy belt is (in the New World) on the Ecuador-Colombian border. It is raining across South America down to Bolivia and across Brazil. The pool of warm water in the eastern Pacific (EN) also affects places other than poor southern California!. There is a mirror effect in the South Temperate Zone. Lots of energy is being pumped into the frontal systems originating in the south Pacific driving across the *southern cone of South America*. Heavy rains in Argentina. Since I will be in Patagonia in two weeks, I am uneasy for I will go around the Horn twice in January (the Austral Summer). In Africa the ITCZ is well developed across Angola, Mozambique and up into Tanzania and out across the Seychelles. Well Developed means that it is raining...! It skirts around India but surprise, it is showing good activity over Indonesia and Papua out through the New Hebrides. Thus the Great Indonesian Low is looking as if it is going to reform (normal) after giving off its excess energy to the east in the form of the *El Nino* Easterly winds seem to be picking up over the Pacific (the normal situation) or at least it so appears today!!. No doubt that the remaining warm water in the Eastern Pacific will continue to distort the ITCZ in central and South America for the next two months or so. And animals will wander into places where they normally don*t occur. But from Panama, I can see evidence for an end to the 1997-98 ENSO."--Neal Smith <SMITHN@tivoli.si.edu>