World Grain - November 2014 - 116

WORLD GRAIN WEATHER REPORT

South America
weather improves
E

xtreme weather conditions seem to be lacking this autumn despite much talk about El Niño throughout the
year and recent worries over hot, dry weather in Brazil.
South America weather has "turned the corner" and will see
a notable shift toward greater and more frequent rainfall in
the next few weeks while El Niño continues to struggle in its
proposed evolution for the second time this year. Without either of these two anomalous weather patterns festering into a
serious problem, most of the late autumn weather is expected
to be tranquil.
After weeks and months of falling futures prices due to binbusting crops in the United States and a failure in the predicted mid-year El Niño event, many traders were putting hope
into delayed seasonal rainfall in Brazil for inducing higher
futures prices. That worked for a little while, but the last week
of October brought forth a more normal looking rainfall pattern for South America and as seasonal rains started to kick in,
support for the bullish market environment were beginning to
disappear. Several weeks ago the market mentality was quite
bearish as talk of huge South America crops spread through
the marketplace. That kind of talk will be on its way back soon
unless something signiﬁcantly different evolves soon.
EL NIÑO
What about the El Niño is that is supposed to bring calamity
for the world and therefore higher futures prices? Forecasters
are having much difﬁculty predicting this El Niño event and
the phenomenon continues to outsmart its predictors.
World Weather, Inc. has done some further research on El
Niño and perhaps this study will help put it all in perspective. First and foremost, none of the world's meteorologists
or climatologists have yet proven that they have the world's
climate all ﬁgured out and that includes this meteorologist.
Many years ago when El Niño was ﬁrst discovered it was believed to be the single most important discovery of its time
and indeed that is still true today. But there is still much to be
learned about the phenomenon and that became more obvious
116

by Drew Lerner

The increasing possibility for huge
crops in that region may make grain
markets even more bearish
this year when El Niño was ﬁrst predicted to become a "super" El Niño and a few months later it still had not evolved.
Forecast models, meteorologists and climatologist have made
a second prediction for El Niño this autumn and winter, but so
far it has eluded the best forecaster.
El Niño-like conditions are present, but the textbook style of El
Niño - like that of the 1980s and 1990s - has yet to emerge and
it is making fools of some forecasters. With that said, the El Niñolike conditions have brought some dryness in eastern Australia
and some of that is quite serious. In fact, dryland summer crops
in Queensland and northern New South Wales will either not be
planted or will be greatly curtailed this year because of the current dryness and ongoing El Niño-like conditions.
Southeast Asia was feared to have a disastrous summer
monsoon season and it did look bad for several weeks, but
conditions suddenly got better as the ﬁrst proposed El Niño
event faded away.
The ﬁrst failing of El Niño occurred because of subsurface
ocean water in the eastern equatorial Paciﬁc Ocean suddenly
began cooling. It did not take long for the cooler ocean water
to counter the water that had warmed previously and eventually the El Niño trend came to an end.
The same phenomenon is occurring now. Previous warming
in the equatorial Paciﬁc Ocean was ﬂashing El Niño signals
from Australia to Washington, D.C., but the cooling now under way below the ocean's surface will be yet another setback
in El Niño's proposed development.
October is the 30th month of neutral ENSO (El Niño
November 2014 / World Grain / www.World-Grain.com

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World Grain - November 2014

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