Abstract

I wouldn't recommend this to the faint of heart. It's a bit terrifying. It's well written, but it tells the long and tangled tale of how theories of the ENSO phenomenon evolved from 1969 to 1998 — a period that saw much progress, but did not end with a neat, clean understanding of this phenomenon. It's packed with hundreds of references, and sprinkled with somewhat intimidating remarks like: The Fourier decomposed longitude and time dependence of these eigensolutions obey dispersion relations familiar to every physical oceanographer... Nonetheless I found it fascinating — so, I'll pick off one small idea and explain it now