A Weather Phenomenon Given a God's Name: El Niño

Last week, flipping through the weather forecast, I saw one line: "El Niño may strengthen."

I stared at those two words for a long time — a borrowed Spanish phrase, and it sounds like a god. I looked it up in a dictionary, and it really is one: El Niño is Spanish for "little boy," specifically "the Christ child" — the baby Jesus.

This name was given by fishermen

The El Niño pages of the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) carry a very plain explanation: the name was first used by fishermen along the coast of South America, to refer to an unusually warm stretch of sea water; it usually appears around the turn of the year, and El Niño means "the little boy" or "the Christ child," because the phenomenon always arrives around Christmas.

The finer details survive in old documents. In 1891, Luis Carranza, president of the Geographical Society of Lima, noted in a short piece that between the ports of Paita and Pacasmayo there runs a north-to-south counter-current, which the sailors who often worked those waters called the "current of El Niño (the Christ child)," because it always appeared after Christmas. In 1895, the Peruvian scholar Pezet told the colleagues present at the Sixth International Geographical Congress in London all about it — that talk was quoted again and again by later works on El Niño, and it was an early step in the name's entry into scholarship.

Afterwards it kept growing: in 1923, the British meteorologist Gilbert Walker, studying the Indian monsoon, named the see-saw of air pressure on either side of the Pacific the "Southern Oscillation"; in the late 1960s, Jacob Bjerknes stitched the ocean's warm water together with the atmosphere's pressure changes, and only then did we have what is now called ENSO (El Niño–Southern Oscillation).

A fisherman's spoken nickname ended up as a term in global climate models. The name never changed; only the people standing behind it did.

We keep naming what we cannot see

We know this move far too well: the wind has its Feng Bo, the sea has its gods, Japan has a wind god and a thunder god (Fujin and Raijin). Why name things at all? Because naming comes before understanding: if you cannot call something by name, you cannot talk about it; and only once you can talk about it might you guard against it.

And once a name exists, people cannot help treating it as a being with a character of its own — "the year El Niño came," "it's in a foul mood this time." That is not ignorance; it is a habit of thought: compressing a vast, irregular force into a character that can be told about.

That is exactly what is interesting about the name El Niño: it began as a fishermen's term for "that warm water around Christmas every year," and later came to mean the abnormally strong years in particular; then, when its opposite state was discovered, people casually gave it a twin name — La Niña, "the little girl." One male and one female, one warm and one cold, and meteorology now has two "little deities."

From the sky to the chart

Modern climate science computes this as probability and circulation; traditional systems put the very same sky onto a chart, and you can start with Qi Zheng Si Yu: A Chinese Star Chart of Sun, Moon and Planets — it places the sun, the moon and the five planets into the twelve houses; and if you want to understand how the solar terms, that set of time coordinates, are fixed, you can look at Huangli Date Selection: Where the Suitable and Avoid Lines Come From. Neither side promises an outcome: one gives probabilities, the other gives an explanation.

Closing

I told a friend about all this; he paused, then said: "So El Niño is just 'the Christ child dropping by'?" I said more or less, except this guest stays a long time on every visit, and brings rain with him. If you too have a "name" you want to figure out, on 占卜迷指 it works like this: you describe your trouble in natural language, the system recommends a suitable method, casts the chart and gives a reading, and you can export it to keep and compare against slowly.

Information current as of 23 September 2026 (China Standard Time).

Sources

• NOAA PMEL: What is El Niño? (origin of the name: The Little Boy / Christ child)
• Kessler (University of Washington): Occasionally Asked Questions (includes the full quotation of Carranza's 1891 short piece and of Pezet's 1895 talk at the Sixth International Geographical Congress in London, quoted from Philander, El Niño, La Niña and the Southern Oscillation, 1990)
• PBS NOVA: Tracking El Niño FAQ (the name was given by Peruvian fishermen; the work of Walker and Bjerknes)

(Note: the article "Where did the name El Niño come from?" linked from NOAA's El Niño pages is in fact Kessler's FAQ page at the University of Washington; this list gives that page's address directly.)

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