NOAA Forecasters See a Respite for California
The that this winters left in the Sierra Nevada have prompted concerns about the flooding that could result when all that frozen water starts to melt and head downhill. But according to NOAAs latest forecasts, temperatures for May through July are highly likely to be in line with historical averages across California and Nevada. For May, much of California could even see cooler-than-normal conditions, the agency said. This could mean the snows melting would be more gradual than abrupt, more beneficial to water supplies than destructive to homes and farms. The picture is relatively optimistic compared to what it could be, said Andrew Schwartz, lead scientist at the Central Sierra Snow Laboratory, part of the University of California, Berkeley. Were not seeing any very warm periods that would cause concern to us yet, he said. And the hope is that when we do see those or if we do see those that they will be later in the season, when the snowpack isnt quite as large. Global weather patterns are in the middle of a . For the past three years, La Nina conditions have prevailed over the Pacific Ocean, which has helped bring drier, warmer weather to the southern half of the United States. Now, in climate worldwide is shifting to its opposite phase: El Nino. According to NOAAs latest forecasts, there is a greater than 60 percent chance that El Nino will develop between May and July. The likelihood that it will form between August and October is greater than 80 percent. This shift means different things for different places, but on the whole, scientists expect the arrival of El Nino to herald . La Nina had been providing a cooling offset to the steady warming of the planet caused by greenhouse-gas emissions. But even that was not enough to stop many parts of the world from experiencing in recent years. Europe, for instance, had its second-warmest year on record in 2022. Worldwide, across land and sea, last month was the second-warmest March since records began in 1850, NOAA said on Thursday. around both poles in March was the second lowest since records began in 1979. Between May and July, NOAA expects temperatures to be above normal across a large swath of the eastern and southern United States, particularly along the Gulf and Atlantic Coasts. The weather is poised to be wetter than average in the Southeast. With conditions over the Pacific in a neutral state, meaning neither El Nino nor La Nina is occurring, there is a wider-than-normal range of possible conditions that could materialize, said Scott Handel, a meteorologist with the NOAA Climate Prediction Center. In general, theres more uncertainty than usual in the precipitation outlook across much of the country, he said. is a climate reporter. He joined The Times in 2017 and was part of the team that won the 2021 Pulitzer Prize in public service for coverage of the coronavirus pandemic.