A warmer than usual spring ahead, forecasters say in longterm outlook
Dakota Dean, 5, of Mattituck swings into spring at Southold Town Beach in Southold on Monday. Credit: Randee Daddona
Monday may have started out a little too winterlike for the first day of spring. But warmer-than-usual temperatures are predicted for this new season, with normal amounts of rainfall.
The main reasons for these trends, meteorologists say, are the ending of the La Niña global weather pattern and a shift into so-called ENSO neutral conditions, along with Earth’s warming. ENSO neutral simply means that the weather is neither influenced by La Niña, which makes hurricanes more likely, or its opposite, the hurricane-quelling El Niño.
“We’re kind of in between La Niña and El Niño, and how long that lasts has yet to be seen,” said David Radell, National Weather Service meteorologist. “At this point, as we get into summer, we look to remain in that neutral pattern.”
With no dominant pattern in place for spring and possibly beyond, said David Robinson, distinguished professor at Rutgers University and the New Jersey state climatologist, “We’ve been in this kind of ‘no man’s land, where [the weather] has fluctuated back and forth. Will that continue? We just don’t know.”
Last spring, March’s average temperature in Islip was almost 42 degrees; April was 60.2 and May was nearly 71, according to Weather Underground, commercial forecasters based in San Francisco.
Daily rainfall last year in Islip averaged 0.1 inch in March, 0.09 in April, and 0.14 in May.
La Niña forms when the equator’s easterly trade winds intensify. That pushes the Pacific Ocean toward Asia, so off Latin America's west coast, the sea’s coldest levels rise to the surface.
Veering toward the West Coast of the U.S., the jet streams allow more hurricanes to arise, though experts say they often spare the East Coast, instead blasting up from the South to the Ohio Valley and the Great Lakes.
La Niña’s opposite, El Niño, can curb storms, as it drives the jet much farther south, into northern Florida and the Gulf of Mexico, according to NOAA.
El Niño arises when easterly trade winds weaken — or even change direction. So less of the ocean’s cooler bottom waters rise to the surface off western South America. And that warmer water can, NOAA says, spill toward the eastern Pacific.
Joshua Feldman, head meteorologist at WeatherOptics, New York business forecasters, agreed the outlook will be unclear for a while longer.
“It’ll take a few weeks for the global weather patterns to sort of adjust to the warm Pacific,” he said, “If there is an average or a strong El Niño, like some of the models are predicting, there’ll be a lot of wind shear in the Atlantic to sort of cut off storms.”
Phil Klotzbach, senior research scientist in the Department of Atmospheric Science at Colorado State University, also pointed to the importance of whether an El Niño pattern arrives, especially as forecasters look toward the Atlantic hurricane season, which starts in June.
“If we end up getting a moderate to strong El Niño, the Atlantic hurricane season will likely be below normal,” he said.
Even without a powerful El Niño, there still could be lots of storms — especially if the Atlantic warms, powering hurricanes with heat and water.
“With just a weak El Niño or if we have neutral ENSO conditions and the Atlantic is warmer than normal, it could still end up being a very busy season,” Klotzbach said. “However, if we have a weak El Niño or neutral conditions and the Atlantic is cooler than normal, it would likely be a below normal season.”
Jeff Masters, a Yale Climate Connections meteorologist and co-founder of Weather Underground, said by email, “El Niño is expected to develop by the peak August-September-October portion of the Atlantic hurricane season.”
Since 1960, that pattern arose 18 times in that three-month stretch — but only four of those years had average or above-average Atlantic tropical cyclone activity, as gauged by the Accumulated Cyclone Energy yardstick, in 1963, 1969, 2004 and 2018, he said.
However, the 2018 record shows what can happen if El Niño doesn’t “arrive in time to significantly dampen this year’s hurricane season,” Masters said.
That year, he said, was near-average, with 15 named storms, including eight hurricanes.
Last year, all the storms that hit New York had weakened below tropical strength.
Snow lovers may hope for a weak or absent El Niño. Said Masters: “If El Niño sticks around and lasts through the winter, El Niño increases the odds of warmer-than-average temperatures across the northern tier of states, with drier conditions also favored.”
