[General] weather pattern

[kompstar]

Hello.

'El Nino, a natural warming of water surface temperatures in the Pacific Ocean has gotten a lot of blame for disrupting normal U.S. weather patterns this winter.'

What does 'weather pattern' mean in the sentence above?

 

[Rover_KE]

What is the source of your quote?

 

[kompstar]

What is the source of your quote?

Here you are: (the begining) http://transcripts.cnn.com/TRANSCRIPTS/1603/17/sn.01.html

 

[Lynxear]

A "pattern" is a reproducible form of behavior.

Normal weather in August might be something like :

1. a slow decline in temperature highs from 80F at the beginning to 70F at the end.
2. no violent wind storms.
3. rain in the first 2 weeks but no rain in the last two weeks.

If this type of weather happened year after year this would form a pattern of behavior.

The effect of El Nino might break this pattern by having violent storms in August or drought or high temperatures in the range of 90F for the whole month.

 

[emsr2d2]

Note that to ensure the correct pronunciation, it should be written "El Niño". (There is another wind called "La Niña".)

 

[Lynxear]

This is true but most of us don't have a Spanish keyboard, so at least in Canada not including accents of foreign words is generally acceptable.

Even here where we have French as our second language we would write "cake" as "gateau" and not "gâteau" or "francais" and not "français". Though I suppose the English have borrowed "gateau" from the French, so it is considered to be an English word.

The only time we would take pains to include accents is if we were writing a formal mainly English document which included French words or some of the reading audience were French and language was a sensitive issue.

 

[GoesStation]

Note that to ensure the correct pronunciation, it should be written "El Niño". (There is another wind called "La Niña".)

El Niño and la Niña are ocean temperature events, not winds.