Abstract
About three months after the beginning of an El Niño/Southern Oscillation (ENSO) year, a rainfall shortage develops over all of New Caledonia (21°S, 165°E) and lasts for 12 months. There is, on the average, a 22% decrease over the mean monthly rainfalls for one year. This result is based on the study of a rainfall composite and of a composite obtained from the first empirical orthogonal function (EOF) extracting more than half of the variance over 30 years of measurement at 18 stations.
