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Several studies show that the El Niño-Southern Oscillation (ENSO) is an important factor in determining interannual rainfall variability in South America. This signal is detected in the region including Northeastern Argentina, Uruguay and part of southern Brazil, in the form of excessive rains and big floods in the regional rivers. To check that this relationship was similar in the past the objectives of this paper were to construct a time series of large floods in the Paraná River region from documentary records, during the sixteenth to eighteenth centuries, and to evaluate the relationship between that historical record of extreme floods, the ENSO documentary evidence (Ortlieb, The Documented Historical Record of El Niño Events in Perú: An Update of the Quinn Record (Ortlieb, sixteenth through nineteenth centuries, Diaz and Markgraf, (eds.), El Niño and the southern oscillation. Multiscale variability and global and regional Impacts. Cambridge University Press, pp. 207-295, 2001; Quinn and Neal, The historical record of El Niño events, Bradley and Jones (eds.), Climate since a.d. 1500, Routledges, pp. 623-648, 1992) and the temperature index of the Pacific Ocean (Mann ME et al., Global temperature patterns in past centuries: an interactive presentation, IGBP pages/world data center for paleoclimatology data contribution series #2000-075. NOAA/NGDC Paleoclimatology Program, Boulder CO, USA, 2000). Considering that the period 1904-2000, where 11 out of 16 floods occurred during El Niño events, it can be concluded that the proportion of years with exceptional flow volume in the Paraná River in years with El Niño events in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries was relatively lower than that of the twentieth century. The reason for this difference is discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article reports on findings of a research project examining farmers' coping strategies in the Brazilian Amazon in response to El Niño related weather events. We examine the extent of vulnerability of small and large farmers to these events in a tropical rainforest environment. Little attention has been given to the impact of ENSO events in Amazônia, despite evidence for devastating fires during ENSOs. Although we found a range of locally developed forecasting techniques and coping mechanisms, farmers have sustained significant losses, and we suggest that increased access to scientific forecasts would greatly enhance the ability of the farmers in our study area to cope with El Niño related weather events. In Amazônia the El Niño phase of the El Niño-Southern Oscillation (ENSO) climate pattern leads to an extended period of reduced rainfall (Hobbs et al., 1998). This period of reduced rainfall can result in significant agricultural losses for farmers and ranchers in the area and in increased forest flammability. We have found that the majority of our study population uses several methods of forecasting, coping with, and adapting to drought events - and they recognize the economic losses they can experience and the loss of forests through the accidental spread of fire. The poorest farmers in our study area experience El Niño related drought events as a serious threat to their livelihoods. Their vulnerability is heightened during extreme climate events and our observations revealed that all of the farmers in our study would benefit from increased availability of improved forecast information relevant to their locality and their current farming strategies. This paper examines the availability and use of forecasts, the occurrence of accidental fires and techniques to prevent fire related losses, and the coping mechanisms for dealing with El Niño related drought in the agricultural regions surrounding the cities of Altamira and Santarém, in Pará State, Brazil. Distribution of an El Niño Prediction Kit at the end of the study and a series of workshops may lead to better local information on rainfall variability and create a farmer-maintained grid of collecting stations to sensitize farmers to the variability of precipitation in the region, and on their property. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]