Experts still expect El Nino to unleash wet weather
By: Matt Weiser

El Niño was predicted to dominate the weather this winter. But a look out the window suggests that forecast has fizzled.

Fresno rainfall so far this winter is only slightly better than average, and the Sierra Nevada snowpack is just 79% of normal.

But don’t give up on El Niño just yet.

Several weather experts predict El Niño will soon crank open the faucet and blow away the cold, gray skies that have gripped the region. They expect much wetter weather through March.

“I’m not wringing my hands terribly much,” said Tim Barnett, a climate researcher at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography in San Diego. “Odds are good to see some pretty good storms later in the winter,” he said. “How much rain, nobody can really tell you. All I can tell you is, it will be in the upper third of all the wet years.”

John Monteverdi, a professor of meteorology at San Francisco State University, said he expects El Niño to begin showing its hand in California this week.

“There are lots of indications that a pattern shift is about to occur,” he said.

A storm passing through California Tuesday and Wednesday may be the start of a wet pattern, though the National Weather Service says chances of rain in the Valley are slight.

A crucial point is that El Niño typically doesn’t deliver its punch until later in the winter. So it’s too early to fear a fourth drought year.

“I don’t expect a whopper” of a rainy season, said Maury Roos, a hydrologist at the California Department of Water Resources. However, “I’m optimistic we will wind up getting a fairly decent January and February, probably above average.”

El Niño is defined as a warming of the equatorial Pacific Ocean that’s typically in place around Christmas — hence the name, which is Spanish slang for “Christ child.”

This warming of the Pacific typically alters weather patterns throughout the Western Hemisphere. In the United States, the Pacific Northwest usually gets drier and the Southwest wetter.

Central California, however, sits between these effects, so El Niño effects here can go either way. The Sierra Nevada snowpack — all-important to the state’s water supplies — is also hard to predict in an El Niño winter.

In 2003 during similar El Niño conditions, Fresno had only 9.8 inches of rainfall, which is 88% of average. But in 1995, the phenomenon helped the city to a 19-inch rainfall total, a whopping 168% of average.

Bill Patzert, a climatologist at the NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, doubts this year’s El Niño will bring major rains. He said its effect is muted by another phenomenon called the Pacific Decadal Oscillation, a longer-term change that is actually trending toward cooler ocean temperatures.

This winter is considered a moderate El Niño, meaning the ocean warming isn’t as great as the historical maximum. This makes rainfall predictions even more difficult.

In an updated forecast released Thursday, the National Weather Service said El Niño strengthened in December. The service still predicts improved odds for above-average precipitation through Jan. 20, especially for Central California, and continuing through March.

A more ambitious prediction comes from Gregg Suhler, whose company, Dynamic Predictables in Columbia, Mo., developed a unique forecasting tool called ATLAS.

Unlike traditional forecasting that relies on climate observations and historical trends, ATLAS uses thermodynamic principles to tap into recurring energy cycles that drive global weather.

Simply put, Suhler said, there is a certain amount of energy in the atmosphere that has to be spent every year in the form of storms. If it isn’t — for instance, during a stretch of drought years — that energy eventually builds up to produce very big storms on a regular cycle.

“January and February are looking to be a really wet sucker,” Suhler said. “We want people to know about it.”

Experts in conventional forecasting are skeptical.

“Over the last decade, we’ve had a lot of false alarms about El Niño,” Patzert said. “As you look back in the historical record, there really haven’t been that many of what I call ‘macho El Niños.’ ”

On the other hand, it’s worth looking at the winter of 1994-95. It started out dry. Californians feared that one of the worst droughts in history — officially recorded from 1987 to 1992 — wasn’t really over.

Then El Niño caused major floods in many areas of the state in January and March 1995, including $220 million in damage and 28 deaths. “It turned out to be a heavy year when it was done, but it was a late bloomer,” Roos said.