El Nino Southern Oscillation (ENSO): Recent evolution and possibilities for long range flow forecasting in the Brahmaputra Jamuna River

The El Nino-Southern Oscillation is the dominant pattern of short-term climate variation, and is therefore of great importance in climate studies. Some recent studies showed the teleconnection between stream flow and the El-Nino Southern Oscillation (ENSO) of the equatorial Pacific Ocean. This paper presents an overview of the relationship between ENSO and stream flow in the Brahmaputra-Jamuna and the potential for wet season flow forecasting. This seasonal forecast of stream flow is very invaluable to the management of land and water resources, particularly in Bangladesh to improve the predictability of severe flooding. Over the years, large investments have been made to build physical infrastructure for flood protection, but it has been proved that it is not feasible, both economically and technically, to adopt solely structural mitigation approach. The choice of non-structural measures in this country focused mainly on flood forecasting because many of the nonstructural measures including flood plain zoning, compulsory acquisition of flood prone land, relocation etc have also been proved inappropriate for Bangladesh.