these attempts were unsuccessful until the mid-1980s when cane and his colleague steve zebiak set outeate a physically based computer model to predict these phenomena. cane: here is this el niÑo phenomenon which i knew about because it had caused these anomalies in wintertime circulation over north america in '77, '78. and i was living in boston at the time and it dumped this incredible amount of snow on us. we kept geing hit by snowstorms. and then we finally got hit by the big one. so, these el niÑo events if we could forecast them and get this information out there there's the possibility of taking actions that will mitigate these impacts. narrator: to understand el niÑo, it is first important to understand the dynamics of the pacific ocean. in the 1960s ucla meteorologist jacob bjerknes proposed that ocean-surface temperatures were linked to atmospheric winds. the evidence he found came from the variation in ocean temperatures on either side of the tropical pacific. cane: he noticed that the state that we consider normal is very odd because the western pacific is warm. like 30 deg