There is a new blog post out at the Southern Plains Persepctive. Read below!
El Niño cometh. That was the subject line in an email from the good folks with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration National Center for Environmental Information (https://www.ncei.noaa.gov/).
The way it looks now, there is a 62% or better chance that we will see a El Niño pattern develop between now and July. Just what does that mean? Well, as those of you who keep up with the weather news (and who follow this blog) know, we just have come out of our third year in a row of La Niña…a rare “triple dip” of the climate pattern that describes the cooling of surface-ocean waters along the tropical west coast of South America. La Niña is the counterpart to El Niño, which is characterized by unusually warm ocean temperatures in the equatorial region of the Pacific Ocean.
Why is this important?
Well, if you are a “weather watcher,” you already know that generally La Niña events lead to higher-than-normal temperatures and drought in the Southern Plains and the Southeast, while El Niño can result in normal to cooler than normal temperatures across the region and higher amounts of precipitation (especially during the fall and winter) with a greater impact the further south you go (sorry Kansas).
I don’t know about you, but to me more rain and cooler temperatures in the Southern Plains sounds much preferable to the weather we have seen these last three years. The kicker is that this may or may not happen.
Just because we are more likely than not moving into an El Niño pattern it doesn’t necessarily mean we are in for a wet summer, fall, and winter. As Gary McManus, the Oklahoma State Climatologist, told the Oklahoma Farm Report in mid-April, summer is not the best season to break a drought in our part of the world. Gary said that generally we need a strong or “super strong” El Niño event to really see relief in the Southern Plains. That said, just the chance of an El Niño changing our weather is far better than a never heard of the fourth year of La Nina.
One wildcard, however, is what this change in the Pacific Ocean could mean to overall global temperatures and what that, in turn, could mean for weather patterns.
Reuters news service reported that some experts feel that El Niño could result in record-breaking temperatures worldwide. Carl Bountempo, the Director of the European Union’s Copernicus Climate Change Service, said “El Niño is normally associated with record-breaking temperatures at the global level. Whether this will happen in 2023 or 2024 is not yet known, but it is, I think, more likely than not.”
In addition, the School of the Environment at Yale posted in 2019 a report that showed that since the 1970s, El Niño’s has been forming farther west in the Pacific Ocean, where temperatures are warmer. Strong El Niño’s (as Gary McManus said) can result in more rain in our part of the world…..but the last “super El Niño” we had was in 2015. If you remember what happened in May 2015, we had the wettest month EVER in the history of Texas and Oklahoma, resulting in record setting flooding in both states. While the record rainfall that May did finally bring an end to the crippling drought of 2011-15, it also generated over $66 billion in storm damage just in Oklahoma.
Does all this mean we will have another record-breaking year? Not necessarily. The new El Niño could be weak and have very little effect on the region (outside of South Texas), meaning potentially more hot, dry weather. El Niño might not even form at all. Remember, if you have a better than 60% chance that it will develop, it still means you have around a 40% chance it won’t. Of course, it could also develop into a “super El Niño” with results similar to 2015.
Pick your poison.
Either way, you need to be prepared for extreme weather regardless if we are looking at droughts or floods. Like Will Rogers said, “If you don’t like the weather in Oklahoma, wait a minute.”
