9/5/2023 0 Comments La weather![]() ![]() 11, 1999, was right in the middle of that three-year La Niña. ![]() Alberta's capital would usually see about 85 centimetres during that time period.ĭuring a three-year La Niña event in the late '90s, storms brought record snowfall.Ī record 145 centimetres of snow - that's about 4.75 feet - fell in a single day at Tahtsa Lake, located in British Columbia's Coast about 120 kilometres southeast of Terrace, according to Environment and Climate Change Canada. That La Niña also meant cold winter temperatures across the Prairies and heavy snowfall in Alberta, where Edmonton saw close to 160 centimetres of snow between October 2010 and March 2011. In the winter of 2010-11, during a particularly powerful La Niña, heavy snowfall dominated Western Canada, with the Mount Washington Alpine Resort on Vancouver Island seeing over 500 centimetres of snow by late December. La Niña will often mean cooler winters in Alberta and Saskatchewan, and wet weather along the west coast. In the past, our La Niña winters have meant wild weather for Western Canada. "This La Niña episode in terms of length is not unprecedented," he says. Though La Niñas vary in length and in strength, if this one rolls over into another winter, it would be the third triple-dip La Niña since 1950, according to the WMO.īut it's not unheard of, adds Moufouma Okia. ![]() "It tends to mean cooler-than-normal conditions for a lot of Western Canada and wetter-than-normal in the south of B.C., close to the coast," says Nathan Gillett, a research scientist with Environment and Climate Change Canada. And floods in other parts of the world, for example, in West Africa," says Wilfran Moufouma Okia, head of the WMO's regional climate prediction services division in Geneva, Switzerland.īut those cold ocean waters play with our Canadian weather, too.ĭuring La Niña years, the jet stream over North America is often shifted further north, which causes changes in temperatures, storm tracks and precipitation, especially in the winter months. "When there is a La Niña, it's normally followed by a kind of drought in East Africa and drought along the coastal area of the Gulf of Mexico. (The Weather Network )Īccording to the WMO, that ocean cooling can trigger changes in the tropical atmospheric circulation, predominantly with winds, pressure and rainfall. La Niña is colder-than-usual temperatures in the Pacific Ocean, which can lead to changes in weather patterns across Western Canada. Nonetheless, that innocent-sounding change can have a big impact on weather along the Pacific coast as well as globally. The benchmark for declaring an El Niño or La Niña is half a degree over or under a long-term average but it can, of course, be more significant than that. It's the opposite of El Niño, where those water temperatures trend warmer. La Niña means that the ocean waters at the surface in the eastern Pacific Ocean are running colder. We are in a La Niña situation right now and have had La Niña winters since 2020.Īccording to the latest report from the World Meteorological Organization (WMO), there is a 70 per cent chance for La Niña to continue through the summer and a 50-to-60 per cent chance it will continue to the end of the year and into another winter.īut what does that mean for our weather locally? And what about the million-dollar question: What role does climate change play? What is La Niña? We could find out this winter. Projections point toward the chance of a "triple-dip" - that is, third consecutive - La Niña winter. La Niña, defined by cooler-than-normal sea surface temperatures in the equatorial Pacific, is in its third consecutive year, although federal researchers believe the phenomenon is ending and we're headed for a "neutral" midwinter and spring, in which neither La Niña nor El Niño rules the Eastern Pacific.Įl Niño is marked by warmer-than-normal sea surface temperatures in the equatorial Pacific that help encourage the tropically supercharged atmospheric rivers that bring serious precipitation to California, which describes what’s been happening since Sunday.Duration 2:08 Meteorologist Christy Climenhaga explains how a third winter of La Nina conditions could affect our Western Canadian weather. The landmark Crystal Pier off Pacific Beach collapses under the force of surging waves during an El Niño storm in San Diego on Jan. "The research community has noticed that the duration of El Niño and La Niña events seems to be elongated so far in the 21st century, which may be a result of global warming," Yu said by email. That, in turn, might affect how they shape the weather. Jin-Yi Yu, a University of California, Irvine, atmospheric scientist, said Tuesday that climate change may have an impact on how long each phenomenon lasts, which in the last 25 years has often been for back-to-back years.
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