El Nino

Central America and Haiti are suffering one of the worst droughts in decades due in part to the strong El Niño weather pattern, "with small-scale farmers sustaining heavy losses in staple crop production," says the Famine Early Warning Network (FEWS NET) created by USAID.

For the first time in three decades, India has "experienced back-to-back monsoon failures," says The Indian Express.

The Australian government forecasting agency raised its estimate of beef exports in the trade year that ends next July 1 by 20 percent, as ranchers liquidate their herds in the face of drought worsened by El Niño, said Reuters.

One of the strongest El Nino weather patterns ever forecast is expected to peak in late fall or early winter but it's too early to say if it will ease the four-year-old drought in Californa.

Long-running drought has "shrunk the kernels and disrupted the proteins of winter wheat crops" in the Pacific Northwest, which grows one-fifth of the U.S. crop, says the Seattle Times.

The Agricultural Market Information System, an international body, said it raised its forecast of this season's corn crop worldwide "significantly, mostly on improved outlook for crops in the EU and the United States." AMIS pegged the crop at 1,001 million tonnes, up 13 million tonnes from a month ago, and said end stocks for 2014/15 would rise by 27 million tonnes.

While drought is entrenched in the West, it has disappeared in the rest of the country for the most part. Some 23 percent of the contiguous United States is in drought, a drop of 15 points since the first week of May, says the Drought Monitor.

The International Grains Council said its forecast of a record-large global rice crop "is tentative, especially given uncertainty about the impact of El Nino on crops in Asia."

The strength of the El Niño or La Niña weather phenomenon in December can help predict the frequency of tornadoes and crop-damaging hailstorms in the southern and central Plains and parts of the South, says the Earth Institute at Columbia University.

Satellite images show California turning brown from its three-year drought, says Weather.com, which posted pictures taken by NASA's Aqua satellite in mid-2011 and this summer. "In the animated image, California's Central Valley appears to have lost much of its plant life, as the green portion in the middle of the image has thinned in the last three years.

Prospects for "historically large" world wheat supplies are likely to result in "a challenging situation for U.S. wheat exports and prices later in 2014," say economists Dan O'Brien and Mykel Taylor of Kansas State University.

The National Weather Service sees an increased likelihood of an El Nino weather pattern developing by this summer and through the rest of the year.

In Central America's Dry Corridor, a historically drought-prone region that stretches from Mexico to Panama and is home to 10.5 million people, climate change is producing longer and more frequent dry spells and forcing a growing number of farmers to attempt to migrate to the U.S., according to FERN's latest story, published with The Weather Channel. <strong>(No paywall)</strong>