AS FAR BACK AS I CAN REMEMBER, I have always been interested in meteorology.

I remember more or less living in the library of my elementary school, devouring every book I could find about weather. By the fifth grade I could read a weather map and identify every element — the isothermal lines that showed temperatures within the U.S. … the distinction between a warm front, a cold front and an occluded front … how winds blow around high and low pressure areas, and so on. And I’ve never lost this interest: I regularly read the more technical discussions published on the Web by the National Weather Service.

I mention all this because there are increasing indications that a significant El Niño event is coming this fall and winter. For all you non-weather geeks out there, I should probably summarize the science involved.

For a variety of reasons, winds in the equatorial Pacific Ocean (in fact, in the deep tropics throughout the world) tend to blow steadily from east to west. In the Pacific, this tends to pile up warm surface waters on the western (Asian) side of the ocean, to the point that the sea level is usually several inches higher on Asian coasts than on the American side. It also means that, because of tropical cyclones arising in and feeding on warm water, the western Pacific is usually the origin of more of those storms than anywhere else on Earth.

Occasionally, however, those steady easterly winds slacken and even reverse direction, and that big pile of warm water sloshes back across the Pacific and piles up on the coast of Central and South America. Sometimes the scope of this “slosh” is relatively modest, along with the effects. Sometimes, however, the warming is significant, and the result is a busy hurricane season in the Eastern Pacific — and torrential rains in California. There are increasing indications that the current El Niño may become a strong or “Super” El Niño. (That said, predictions are not guarantees, so it’s not time to start lavishly watering our drought-parched lawns just yet.)

The last strong El Niño was 18 years ago, in the winter of 1997-98 — in fact that event was the strongest in recorded history. I have vivid memories of that rainy season. There was an unusually early rainstorm in August of that year, another in September — and then, sometime in early October, clouds rolled in and it began to rain. And rain. And rain.

I remember some time after the holidays that winter, I suggested to my girlfriend that we flee the incessant rains and set out to find the sun. We packed my car, hit the road and headed south. We finally saw the sun break through the clouds when we were well south of the Mexican border, on the coast of Baja California. We stopped in a little beachside town and had a dinner of fish tacos. Because of my near-paranoia about the water quality in Mexico, I would drink nothing but straight, hard liquor, which down there means tequila. (I have vague memories of some drunken person, possibly yours truly, staggering around on the beach that evening and saying over and over, “We found the sun, honey! We found the sun!” I also remember a very long, tense ride back from Mexico.)

I am old enough to remember the only previous Super El Niño, in the winter of 1982-83, and the experience was similar: storm after storm roared ashore, dumping torrential rains onto already-saturated ground and leading to severe flooding, mudslides and other damage across California.

There are already indications that this year may be unusual. Hurricanes have been forming in the eastern Pacific at a near-record pace, there have been sightings of typically tropical species in the warming waters along our coast, and Southern California has already had the wettest July in its history, which contributed to the recent flash floods that washed out a bridge along Interstate 10. Texas and Oklahoma have both experienced not only drought-ending rains, but actual flooding.

The good news closer to home is that, after four years of exceptional drought, there is plenty of room in our reservoirs to absorb excess rains, and the parched soils in the state will take longer than usual to reach saturation. That said, however, I’m not at all complacent about the possibility of weather-related trouble this coming rainy season. I plan to put together a disaster kit in the next few weeks — bottled water, extra batteries, canned food and so on — to be as prepared as possible if the coming El Niño has the expected effects.

Matt Talbot is a writer and poet, as well as an old Benicia hand. He works for a tech start-up in San Francisco.

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