Mighty Monsoon

Tracking those Asian winds

It has all the bustle of a wartime staff room. Poring over charts and maps, officials plot their strategy, barking orders into a battery of phones. On the seas and in the skies, the enemy is tracked by an armada of instrument-laden ships, balloons and buoys, aircraft and weather satellites that feeds intelligence into a support force of computers. But this is a bloodless war. The only object is to study the foe: Asia's mighty monsoon, the great seasonal winds that annually bring life or death to hundreds of millions of people.

Launched a few weeks ago to coincide with the start of the winter season, the $50 million multination effort, called MONEX (for Monsoon Experiment), is being directed by the U.N.'s World Meteorological Organization. At the command post in the Malaysian capital of Kuala Lumpur, some 70 Americans and Soviets, as well as weather watchers from Asian and other countries, are beginning the first systematic profile of an annual monsoon cycle. Gathering data from an area of some 28 million sq. mi., the scientists have two lofty goals: to explore the origin of monsoon winds so they can be predicted with greater accuracy and to fit the role of monsoons into global weather patterns.

Having long concentrated on northerly climes, scientists know little more about the monsoon than did the old Arab traders who named the awesome wind mausam, or season. In fact there are not one but two monsoons every year. Rolling off the tropical seas from the southwest, the sodden summer winds unleash torrential rains that give life to crops across India--and take human lives as swollen rivers flood towns (this year's toll: at least 900 dead, 3 million homeless). Reversing themselves after an autumn lull, the winds return, this time from the northeast, carrying cool, relatively dry air. Building to gale force in northeast Asia, they sometimes bring frost to tropical Hong Kong. In Southeast Asia, after sweeping the sea, they bring vital rain.

Yet as familiar as the monsoon cycle may be, the winds remain inscrutable--"a sea of question marks," says Australian Meteorologist Peter Webster. Predicting them is bafflingly difficult; they are a cauldron of complex, wildly fluctuating conditions. Says the U.S. National Science Foundation's Richard Greenfield: "They can vary fantastically over the space of a few miles, and even a one-or two-degree temperature shift sets vast amounts of airborne water dropping."

MONEX scientists are thus doing the only thing they can do--everything. That includes searching for pollution and Siberian dust over Borneo (which may affect the rain and winds), keeping a weather eye on cold surges (masses of low-temperature air moving rapidly down from Siberia) and sending up balloons into equatorial air currents. All the while, satellites provide an overview with hourly pictures.

Part of a yearlong international effort known as the Global Weather Experiment, MONEX should help fill in crucial missing pieces in the jigsaw puzzle of global meteorology. But some scientists remain skeptical about how much can be learned. Says the University of Hawaii's Colin Ramage, who observed monsoons for more than a decade in India and Hong Kong: "The atmosphere is fundamentally chaotic. We shouldn't promise what we can't deliver." Joachim Kuettner, MONEX director for the U.S., takes a sunnier view. Says he: "The global experiment is the first chance to answer the ultimate question: Are there natural limits to [weather] prediction?"

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