What the heck happened to the Godzilla El Niño?
That is a question a lot of Central Texans have been asking the National Weather Service, and one posed earlier this week by the Texas Standard. After all, we’re still experiencing an unusually strong El Niño – a cyclical weather pattern in the Pacific characterized by a warming of surface temperatures – and that pattern helped to produce an unusually cool and damp fall/early winter here, as El Niños tend to do. But come 2016 the skies dried up and the weather went through periods of unseasonable warmth. Earlier this week we even hit particularly dangerous wildfire conditions.
So what gives? Is this really what a wetter-than-normal winter should look like?:
AMERICAN-STATESMAN file photo
It could be that the Godzilla El Niño just got tired and needed to catch its breath, as the Texas Standard interview suggested, particularly with May and June typically being rainy months. But Paul Yura, the second-in-command of the National Weather Service office that serves Central Texas, said there is another possible answer. It involves making a distinction between normal El Niños, which crop up every few years, and particularly strong ones, which are rare.
The normal ones tend to bring higher-than-typical rainfall. The really strong ones actually don’t. It’s not clear exactly why. It’s also a distinction that tends not to get raised a lot. There have been only a handful of the really powerful El Niños, which means using them to predict how the weather of future will be is little dicey. (It’s a “small sample size,” in research parlance, a situation that tends to give scientists the heebie-jeebies.)
Still, in light of the (admittedly small) amount of info yielded by previous Godzilla-scale El Niños, today’s weather might not be that strange, Yura said. Perhaps the wet weather of the fall was the anomaly.
Larry Hopper, another forecaster at the Weather Service office, added another possible explanation about why what we’re seeing now might not be that weird. He noted that Central Texas was so far ahead of its typical rainfall totals last year – the second-wettest on record in Austin – that a dry stretch could simply be returning to the totals a typical El Niño yields, totals that are still above normal. Rain does not typically fall in a steady pitter-patter in Central Texas, but tends to come in cycles; an unusually wet period followed by a dry period can still be wetter than usual if they are averaged together.
“We might have had most of our rainfall on the front end,” Yura said.
And, though January may have seemed unusually warm, the average high of 63 degrees was just above the normal average high of 61.5 degrees.
The fire danger may stick around a while. The rains of last year saturated the ground, which in turn led to well-watered foliage, which is a good thing if you like lots of healthy foliage, but can present a problem when the weather turns dry. Lots of well-grown plant life is drying out. That means more fuel added to the fires.
“When we go through a wet period,” Yura said, “it’s usually followed by a high risk of wildfires.”
