Industry News
This year’s strong El Nino has already been called a Godzilla El Nino by NASA. It’s hoped that it will bring drought relief in the form of rain and snow to California this winter.
Great, so when will it all start? According to meteorologist Mike Pecher, of Golden West Meteorology, it’s not going to get started until January. January? That’s over 2 months away…
“This El Niño is not supposed to peak until the spring, which leads me to believe we will have a normal weather pattern in November and December. The likelihood is the heaviest stuff will come in January, February and March.” – Mike Pechner, of Golden West Meteorology, told the SF Chronicle
Here in Lake Tahoe, CA we’re really hoping on El Nino getting started in November and blanketing our favorite ski resorts in deep snow so we can get this ski season started out with a bang. Pechner’s predictions are putting a damper on those hopes.
After 4 years of drought and 4 terrible ski seasons in California, waiting until January for the big snow to come will work… as long as it does come.
The scariest thing about all this El Nino hype is that a strong El Nino truly dosen’t mean above average precipitation for the Sierra Nevada mountains of California. It does most likely mean above average temperatures for the Sierras.
Right now, NOAA is forecasting a 33% chance of above average precipitation in most of the Sierra Nevada. We’ll keep our fingers crossed.
I’ve seen plenty of non-El Nino influenced winters with big early season dumps. That’s part of the beauty of Tahoe. All it takes is one good storm and we are in business.
Bill Patzert, a JPL meteorologist often quoted in the LA Times article, is well respected here in SoCal. The chart linked below from that article is instructive.
http://www.epicski.com/image/id/1220044/width/900/height/900/flags/LL
Note that nearly all the excess precipitation occurred in February. The 1997-98 SoCal ski season through January was nothing to write home about. Spring was great with the deep base from February and modest refresher storms. The message from this is that El Nino is predictive in a broad and not specific sense. You’ll see some excess snow sometime during the season but it’s a fool’s errand to predict it at a specific time.
I don’t buy that we can predict which months(s) are likely to be the big ones this time. But my conclusion is the same as this article. Betting on there being a ton off snow on the ground before Christmas is speculative, and the El Nino doesn’t raise the odds of that happening all that much.