El Niño is likely coming back. What does that mean for California?

San Francisco ^ | Amy Graff | April 28, 2023

[nickcarraway]

El Niño is back in the news.

Long-range forecasts suggest an El Niño weather oscillation may develop in the Pacific Ocean in late summer and could continue into fall and even winter.

After California's storm-packed winter that brought damaging and deadly flooding across the state, the mention of El Niño may sound terrifying. The weather pattern has long been associated with unusually wet winters in the Golden State. In reality, though, not all El Niños are the same, and if the weather pattern does develop, any number of scenarios could unfold in the upcoming winter. Many factors are at play, including the strength of El Niño, a changing climate and weather oscillations, which are recurring weather patterns associated with conditions in the atmosphere and oceans.

exp-player-logo “In El Niño years, California has seen above-normal, below-normal and normal precipitation,” Jan Null, a local forecaster who founded Golden Gate Weather Services, told SFGATE. “There’s not a single playbook for these. El Niño doesn’t equal wet.”

Case in point: Looking at records going back 50 years, the winters of 1997-98 and 1982-83 were marked by very strong El Niños, and California saw above-normal rainfall. The same weather pattern also developed in the winter of 2015-16, and the state saw below-normal rainfall.

“​​We were expecting California to just turn into mud in the winter of 2016, and for the most part, all of the Northwest and California were drier than normal,” said Brian Garcia, a meteorologist with the National Weather Service.

[DAC21]

“After California’s storm-packed winter that brought damaging and deadly flooding across the state”

It’s called weather, these things go hand in hand. Get over it.