Dear viewers of the El Niño or a La Niña soap opera,
The July update didn't make any headlines so I missed it until now. However the forecast continues to be for a El Niño event for this autumn and winter. Here is the link:
http://www.cpc.ncep.noaa.gov/products/analysis_monitoring/enso_disc_jul2018/ensodisc.shtmlThe summary reads as follows:
"ENSO-neutral is favored through Northern Hemisphere summer 2018, with the chance for El Niño increasing to about 65% during fall, and to about 70% during winter 2018-19"Wikipedia has a list of regional impacts based on overall research:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/El_Ni%C3%B1o#Regional_impactsAccording to the same Wikipedia article, the recent El Niño events are listed here:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/El_Ni%C3%B1o#OccurrencesThe last two are the end of 2009-10 and 2014-15. My station went up in October 2009, so I don't have the 2009-10 winter. The 2014-15 event was the worst drought episode recorded by my station.
On the other hand, according to Wikipedia the La Niña events are:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/La_Ni%C3%B1a#OccurrencesThat includes most of 2010 and 2016-17 wet years. That is consistent with the overall observation that La Niña events bring additional rainfall to Northern California:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/La_Ni%C3%B1a#North_AmericaIt seems to me that at least for Northern California, El Niño now brings droughts while La Niña events seem to intensify atmospheric rivers. So depending on where you are in the Western United States, this could be another tough and dry winter.
Oh well, . . . . . Edouard