{"id":4151,"date":"2012-01-05T13:43:29","date_gmt":"2012-01-05T19:43:29","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/stateimpact.npr.org\/texas\/?p=4151"},"modified":"2012-02-09T16:35:31","modified_gmt":"2012-02-09T22:35:31","slug":"she-just-wont-leave-la-nina-drought-will-stay-until-spring","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/stateimpact.npr.org\/texas\/2012\/01\/05\/she-just-wont-leave-la-nina-drought-will-stay-until-spring\/","title":{"rendered":"She Just Won’t Leave: La Ni\u00f1a, Drought, Will Stay Until Spring"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"\"<\/a>

Photo by Scott Olson\/Getty Images<\/p>

An empty rain gauge near Canadian Texas.<\/p><\/div>\n

Stop me if you’ve heard this one before: Government forecasters today reported that the drought will not be over before Spring.<\/p>\n

La Ni\u00f1a, the dry weather pattern that has been in part responsible for the drought this past year, is going to stick around a little longer<\/a>, say scientists with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric\u00a0Administration (NOAA). That means “drier-than-average” conditions throughout the South and Texas.<\/p>\n

La Ni\u00f1a<\/a> is\u00a0a weather pattern where the surface temperatures are cooler in the Pacific, which creates drier, warmer weather in the southern U.S<\/a>. (You may also know her counterpart, El Ni\u00f1o, which generally has the opposite effect.) La Ni\u00f1a\u00a0sticks around for a year, sometimes longer, and tends to return once every few years. The last La Ni\u00f1a occurred in\u00a01995.<\/p>\n

But a majority of the NOAA models of La Ni\u00f1a predict that it will dissipate from March to May.\u00a0<\/p>\n

“It’s not all that bad,” John Nielsen-Gammon<\/a>, the state climatologist, told StateImpact Texas. “First of all, normally La Ni\u00f1a\u00a0lasts about that\u00a0time frame. Secondly, as you get into April and May the correlations between our weather and La Nina weaken so it doesn’t have as big of an impact.”<\/p>\n

La Ni\u00f1a will be leaving during the typical rainy season in Texas, a time when spring rains could help\u00a0replenish\u00a0water sources. But, “the odds are tilted toward slightly dry weather, but not strongly so,” Nielsen-Gammon says. “There’s nothing in the forecast that’s surprising. This is how we expected it to play out.”<\/p>\n

Real relief from the drought — the point when\u00a0reservoirs\u00a0and lakes return to normal levels — likely won’t come before next winter. “We’d have to be pretty lucky to see\u00a0reservoir\u00a0levels rise during the summer because that’s when demand is the greatest,” Nielsen-Gammon says.<\/p>\n

But what if La\u00a0Ni\u00f1a leaves in the Spring, and then returns? That’s what happened last year, and was a major factor in the drought: back-to-back La\u00a0Ni\u00f1as. And in five out of the last ten 2-year La Ni\u00f1as, they were followed by a third year of the pattern. Nielsen-Gammon says there’s “no guarantee” that won’t happen this time, which would take the record single-year drought into even more extreme territory.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Stop me if you’ve heard this one before: Government forecasters today reported that the drought will not be over before Spring. La Ni\u00f1a, the dry weather pattern that has been in part responsible for the drought this past year, is going to stick around a little longer, say scientists with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric\u00a0Administration […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":50,"featured_media":548,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[58],"tags":[61,110,85],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/stateimpact.npr.org\/texas\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4151"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/stateimpact.npr.org\/texas\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/stateimpact.npr.org\/texas\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stateimpact.npr.org\/texas\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/50"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stateimpact.npr.org\/texas\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4151"}],"version-history":[{"count":12,"href":"https:\/\/stateimpact.npr.org\/texas\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4151\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4160,"href":"https:\/\/stateimpact.npr.org\/texas\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4151\/revisions\/4160"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stateimpact.npr.org\/texas\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/548"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/stateimpact.npr.org\/texas\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4151"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stateimpact.npr.org\/texas\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4151"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stateimpact.npr.org\/texas\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4151"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}