LA NINA IS RETURNING TO THE PACIFIC
Written By: Scott Hetsko
The image on the left is the most recent sea surface temperatures and departure from normal in the equatorial Pacific this past week. The cooler than normal temperatures (La Nina) is returning to the Pacific and is forecast to grow stronger through Autumn.
La Nina was last around in 2008 and helped bring a dry September followed by a cooler than average October and November. Since La Nina is NOT the only contributing factor on our weather, it's not really possible to determine how Autumn and Winter will behave at this point!
Just read your article about La Nina...I know its early...any very preliminary thoughts about this upcoming winter? Some sites are claiming this winter will look like 1995-96, a very cold, snowy and LONG winter season.
ReplyDeletei hope we get a lot of snow we need a blizzard but not a big one just like 10 inches because last year we hardly got any snow. i love the winter.
ReplyDeleteI love Winter too, nice to see someone else who is brave enough to say it.
ReplyDeletelet's put it this way...the last La Nina, as Scott point out, was the winter of 2007-08. That winter was a fairly vigorous la nina, and we recieved over 100" of snow!
ReplyDeleteAlso, the second largest seasonal snowfall of 142" in a single season occurred in a La Nina winter. Just some facts for thought.
Also, the average total season snowfall for all the la nina winters dating back to 1970 is 103"
ReplyDeleteBut again, as Scott pointed out, there's much more that goes into forecasting this stuff. No one winter follows a specific formula...if it did, this field would be much easier. but it's not. There are things like the NOA, AO, PNA and MJO to consider. Those are hard to predict from week to week sometimes, much less months out!