Dan Leonard, MetDesk USA: What does the super El Nino mean for Maine's winter?

So even though I quote unquote retired from weather about a year ago, I still get asked a lot.

And it has really picked up as the weather's cooled down a bit recently.

People really want to know what this El Nino, they're hearing about it on TV, right? And all media as a super El Nino.

And they want to know what that means for winter.

And specifically, let's dive into Northeast winters and kind of walk people through.

We probably should start with what El Nino is and then maybe just go from there.

Yeah, well, okay, first things first, for those who don't know me, I'm a medium and long range forecaster, and I've been doing this for a long time now, the majority of my career.

So one of the things that we do in medium and long range forecasting is we're looking at what we call teleconnections, which is basically looking at other parts of the world and trying to find similarities between a weather pattern that happens, say, on this part of the planet compared to what might happen at some future time over on this part of the planet.

That's the one way a lot of meteorologists will do long-range forecasting.

So, of course, a really big one is ENSO, or the El Nino Southern Oscillation.

Essentially what this is, most of you know this already, but it's the equatorial waters of the eastern Pacific when they're above normal, when they turn really warm, You're in an El Nino phase, the opposite when you're in a La Nina phase.

And the pattern, the weather patterns that this sea surface temperature anomaly causes are so strong when you get a really high anomaly in the Pacific.

that they can perturb the weather around the globe, which is very unusual because sea surface temperatures normally don't have that big of an impact on the global atmospheric pattern.

But in this case, El Nino was one of those rare cases that you can impact the pattern.

So what we do as researchers is we're looking at the evolution of the sea surface temps in the Pacific, seeing El Nino come on, and then we look at correlations to try to say, okay, the atmosphere is behaving this way.

We can expect as we go forward that this is the type of pattern over, say, North America that we could get one, two, three months down the road.

Yeah, I think that's a good – I like that you started there because I think there are a lot of terms in weather like this that get thrown around, and then there's very little explanation done on it.

And some are easy, like the polar vortex.

It's kind of what you picture.

That's fine.

But I do think El Nino and La Nina are in the mainstream vernacular, but also – like what what is it and how does that work so we uh in the northeast are going to come into barring something that i haven't seen yet we're going to come into the fall and winter on a drought right and um Does El Nino tell us anything about how our late fall pattern is going to be and what our winter pattern is going to be? And then we can dissect a little bit.

I obviously have some opinions on this and seasonal forecasting, but maybe we can talk a bit about that.

What does it mean most often for the Northeast going into fall and winter?

Not great things, to be honest, unless you hate winter, and then you'll be happy to hear the forecast.

But essentially, when you're in an El Nino pattern, at least a strong El Nino pattern, you tend to be relatively mild and dry across the northeastern US, including most of New England.

So even though I quote unquote retired from weather about a year ago, I still get asked a lot.

And it has really picked up as the weather's cooled down a bit recently.

People really want to know what this El Nino, they're hearing about it on TV, right? And all media as a super El Nino.

And they want to know what that means for winter.

And specifically, let's dive into Northeast winters and kind of walk people through.

We probably should start with what El Nino is and then maybe just go from there.

Yeah, well, okay, first things first, for those who don't know me, I'm a medium and long range forecaster, and I've been doing this for a long time now, the majority of my career.

So one of the things that we do in medium and long range forecasting is we're looking at what we call teleconnections, which is basically looking at other parts of the world and trying to find similarities between a weather pattern that happens, say, on this part of the planet compared to what might happen at some future time over on this part of the planet.

That's the one way a lot of meteorologists will do long-range forecasting.

So, of course, a really big one is ENSO, or the El Nino Southern Oscillation.

Essentially what this is, most of you know this already, but it's the equatorial waters of the eastern Pacific when they're above normal, when they turn really warm, You're in an El Nino phase, the opposite when you're in a La Nina phase.

And the pattern, the weather patterns that this sea surface temperature anomaly causes are so strong when you get a really high anomaly in the Pacific.

that they can perturb the weather around the globe, which is very unusual because sea surface temperatures normally don't have that big of an impact on the global atmospheric pattern.

But in this case, El Nino was one of those rare cases that you can impact the pattern.

So what we do as researchers is we're looking at the evolution of the sea surface temps in the Pacific, seeing El Nino come on, and then we look at correlations to try to say, okay, the atmosphere is behaving this way.

We can expect as we go forward that this is the type of pattern over, say, North America that we could get one, two, three months down the road.

Yeah, I think that's a good – I like that you started there because I think there are a lot of terms in weather like this that get thrown around, and then there's very little explanation done on it.

And some are easy, like the polar vortex.

It's kind of what you picture.

That's fine.

But I do think El Nino and La Nina are in the mainstream vernacular, but also – like what what is it and how does that work so we uh in the northeast are going to come into barring something that i haven't seen yet we're going to come into the fall and winter on a drought right and um Does El Nino tell us anything about how our late fall pattern is going to be and what our winter pattern is going to be? And then we can dissect a little bit.

I obviously have some opinions on this and seasonal forecasting, but maybe we can talk a bit about that.

What does it mean most often for the Northeast going into fall and winter?

Not great things, to be honest, unless you hate winter, and then you'll be happy to hear the forecast.

But essentially, when you're in an El Nino pattern, at least a strong El Nino pattern, you tend to be relatively mild and dry across the northeastern US, including most of New England.