the eastward transport of warm water from the warm-pool must increase the temperature of the eastern region. However, the occurrences of El Niños, at least for EP types, cannot be solely attributed to the CECC. For example, for the event in 1997/98, the strongest SST anomaly occurred at the far eastern end of the Pacific where the CECC became very weak. Hence, there must be other contributors in the EP, where the most likely candidate is the NECC.

According to , in the east Pacific the equatorward transport of warm water from NECC may occur at any longitude. In particular, there are two strong intervals: one lies between $140^{\circ}$W–$110^{\circ}$W and the other lies to the east of $90^{\circ}$W. If limit them by $3^{\circ}$N and $5^{\circ}$N, then we obtain two regions for the equatorward flow. These regions are very sensitive to El Niño, so we refer to them as “Niño-A" and “Niño-B" regions, respectively (see ). It is very interesting to find that Niño-A region is a meridional passage which connects the east low-speed gap of the NECC (see and ) and the equator. We note that the lowest speed of this gap is near $110^{\circ}$W, which agrees well with the 