Will La Niña ever appear this season? Good question!

12-13-24. 1:30pm. This Update is brought to you by Jack Garrett and Phase II Fertilizer. Phase II, Inc. was founded in 1994 with a mission to Help Family Farmers & Ranchers Thrive. You can reach Jack at 361-275-4841.

Kind of a yucky day out there for many locations with drizzle and fog impacting much of our area. Look for several more days of light rain, clouds and mild temperatures ahead of our next seasonal front on Monday. Monday’s front will cool us down a little and give us a chance for thunderstorms. A more powerful front arrives on Wednesday, giving us additional chances for rain. I’ll have an update on this and the latest Christmas forecast tomorrow.

The latest drought report came out yesterday and no surprise, things are getting worse. We are going to need a very decent rain event to put even a dent in our current situation. The good news is that if we get one, there is less evaporation this time of the year and the moisture will stay in the soil longer than during the summer months.

I’m reading over the latest ENSO data this morning and it’s starting to look like we could stay in an ENSO- Neutral pattern (No El Niño or La Niña) this winter and leading into next spring.

Here’s what the report released today from the CPC says:

“The dynamical models in the IRI plume continue to predict a weak and a short duration La Niña, as indicated by the Niño-3.4 index values less than -0.5C (Fig. 6). This prediction is also reflected in the latest North American Multi-Model Ensemble (NMME), which continues to predict slightly cooler SSTs and weak La Nina conditions. The forecast team leaned toward predicting an eventual onset of weak and short-lived La Nina conditions, based on the model guidance and current atmospheric anomalies. Weak La Niña conditions would be less likely to result in conventional winter impacts, though predictable signals could still influence the forecast guidance (e.g., CPC's seasonal outlooks).”

With very few winters that have been in an ENSO neutral pattern, it becomes very hard to predict what kind of winter to expect going forward. I can say that the three out of the most recent four winter seasons of ENSO-Neutral conditions (80-81, 85-86, 90-91 and 2013-14) were drier than normal. But with only a handful of winters that have been neutral, it’s really not enough info to make any kind of a decent prediction. Speaking of predictions, I predicted at least a couple of arctic outbreaks this winter and I still feel bullish on those occurring, probably in January or February.

Mark