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Weather forecasters with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration on Thursday released their latest outlook for the United States, and there’s at least one piece of hopeful news for a state that’s had a wild year, weather-wise: California.
News
The huge piles of snow left by winter’s high winds in the Sierra Nevada are raising concerns about possible flooding when all the frozen water begins to melt and descend.
But according to the latest NOAA forecast, temperatures for May through July may be in line with historical averages in California and Nevada. For May, much of California could even see colder-than-normal conditions, the agency said. This could mean snowmelt will be more gradual than sudden, more beneficial to water supplies than damaging homes and farms.
“The picture is relatively optimistic compared to what’s possible,” said Andrew Schwartz, principal scientist at the Central Sierra Snow Laboratory, part of the University of California, Berkeley.
“We haven’t seen a very warm period that would cause concern,” he said. “And the hope is that if we see it – or if we see it – it will be later in the season, when the snowpack is not big enough.”
The bigger picture
Global weather patterns are in the midst of a major transition. For the past three years, La Niña conditions have prevailed in the Pacific Ocean, which has helped bring drier and warmer weather to the southern United States. Now, the most important factor in the climate around the world is moving into the opposite phase: El Niño.
According to the latest NOAA forecast, there is a more than 60 percent chance that El Niño will develop between May and July. The probability that it will form between August and October is more than 80 percent.
This shift means different things for different places, but in general, scientists expect the arrival of El Niño to herald higher global temperatures. La Niña has provided a cooling offset to keep the planet warm due to greenhouse gas emissions. But even this has not been enough to prevent many parts of the world from experiencing near-record heat in recent years.
Europe, for example, has its second warmest year in 2022. Worldwide, across land and sea, last month was the second warmest March since records began in 1850, NOAA said Thursday. March’s polar sea ice extent was the second lowest since records began in 1979.
What’s Next
Between May and July, NOAA expects above-normal temperatures over large areas of the eastern and southern United States, particularly along the Gulf and Atlantic coasts. The weather is predicted to be wetter than average in the Southeast.
With conditions in the Pacific in a “neutral” state, meaning neither El Niño nor La Niña is occurring, there are some more-than-normal conditions that could occur, said Scott Handel, a meteorologist with NOAA’s Climate Prediction Center. .
“In general, there is more uncertainty than usual in the precipitation outlook across many countries,” he said.
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