THIS was one storm that the meteorologists couldn't predict. When Vasant Gowariker, scientific adviser to the Prime Minister, and a team of meteorologists from the India Meteorological Department (IMD), announced in early April that the coming monsoon will be on the lower side of normal, the prediction drew a great deal of flak.

EL Nino refers to the warm current that flows southward along the coasts of Ecuador and Peru, between January and March, which marks the end of the local fishing season when the

Nearly 50% of terrigenous materials delivered to the world's oceans are delivered through just twenty-one major river systems. These river-dominated coastal margins (including estuarine and shelf ecosystems) are thus important both to the regional enhancement of productivity and to the global flux of C that is observed in land-margin ecosystems. The tropical regions of the biosphere are the most biogeochemically active coastal regions and represent potentially important sinks of C in the biosphere.