The Zuñi Pueblo still offers a traditional rain dance in time of drought. The tribe can point with pride to many occasions over the last thousand years where a good rain did in fact follow the rain dance within a matter of days. They'll also tell you if it doesn't work, it's probably because the necessary customs weren't followed to the letter. The tribe believes natural forces must be respected and that there are consequences to disrespect.
In this same region, the White People enter into sacred nightly trances during which pronouncements of the Weather Man may be heard concerning El Nino and rain The Child will surely bring. The Weather Man is believed to have special powers (despite no formal education in the atmospheric sciences), manifesting that wisdom via a totemic Seal display: only those who have correctly answered 75 of 100 multiple choice questions demanded of the American Weather Association may wear the coveted Certified Broadcast Meteorologist Seal on their chest.
Traditions of the two cultures come together at special casinos administered by the San Carlos Apache near the border. There the White People arrive confident that the supreme predictive power of their statistical ju-ju can beat Hogan (house) odds against the El Nino directing Pacific storm tracks their way; this year they unfortunately had to leave behind their car titles, turquoise beltbuckles and iphones.
This is perhaps because the White People did not listen to their Chief Trenberth who said -- after it was too late -- that traditional areas weren't respected, it wasn't a big El Niño where it mattered so of course the rains would not come but he simply forgot to pass along his brilliant hindcast to the Weather Man:
"while this is technically a very strong El Niño, it’s not playing out as expected because tribal members are too focused on temperatures of specific regions, rather than the big picture. This El Niño has been called ‘very strong’ but that is true if one measures it only by the warmth in the eastern tropical Pacific. But most El Niños also feature a cooling in the western tropical Pacific, and that is largely absent this year.”
As a result, Trenberth said, the differences in temperature along the equator are much less than previous super El Niños, and the reversal in the trade winds that blow across the tropics is much weaker than we saw in the winter of 1997-1998, when Southern California saw nearly 14 inches of rain in the month of February alone..In addition, a lot of action is occurring in a very warm tropical Indian Ocean, which is interfering with the Pacific Ocean activity.
“A consequence of this is that the activity in the eastern Pacific has been nowhere near as strong as expected, and in fact it disappeared a couple of weeks ago,” said Trenberth. It’s the eastern Pacific activity that tends to have the most influence on Southern California storm tracks.
