After three consecutive years of La Niña weather circulations, El Niño is making iit’s return —in a big way. The La Niña and El Niño weather patterns are climate patterns in the Pacific Ocean that affect global climate conditions.
What is El Niño?
In recent years, the US has had its weather influenced by La Niña patterns. La Niña refers to the cooling period that takes place on the sea-surface temperatures, which results in colder, drier winters. La Niña can be tied to more dangerous weather like more Atlantic storms, droughts and wildfires in the West.
On the other hand, La Niña’s more famous counterpart, El Niño, will produce a wetter and potentially snowier winter. The El Niño phase occurs when sea temperatures have been warming for an extended period of time. This year’s El Niño began in June, is expected to be strong this winter and last at least into early next spring, according to NOAA’s Climate Prediction Center.
What will an El Niño winter look like?
Though not ever El Niño is the same, they do tend to take predictable forms. A common trend during El Niño oscillations is wetter and cooler weather to the South, along with drier and warmer weather in the North. This is likely because of a shift in the position of the jet stream, which essentially is a tunnel of air that storms travel through. According to CNN, this could be really helpful for Southern states like Texas and Louisiana, which have been grappling with a drought.
Along with these drier conditions, climate scientists are predicting warmer than normal temperatures in the North as well.
The Role of Climate Change
The shift from La Nina to El Nino typically takes place every couple of years, and El Niño only sticks around for 9-12 months. Though human caused greenhouse gas emissions, one factor of climate change, has led to much stronger La Niña and El Niño since the 1960s. The strong variability has contributed to more extreme and frequent droughts, floods, heatwaves, bushfires and storms around the world.
The rare three year long La Niña oscillation that has finally subsided results in extreme flooding and more severe weather. As the issue of climate change gets worse, it can be expected that weather variety and severity will increase. For example, a super strong El Niño oscillation may send the MidWest into a drought or plague the South with freezing rain.
