La Niña Has Arrived. Here’s What That Means

By Scott Dance

The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration declared the return of La Niña on Thursday, marking the start of an expected period of global cooling that nonetheless carried ominous signs about the trajectory of world temperatures.

The climate pattern is the inverse of the better-known El Niño and is known for cooling a vast swath of the Pacific Ocean. That tends to lower average global temperatures, while also encouraging weather extremes that include intense Atlantic hurricanes, East African drought and floods in Indonesia.

But La Niña’s cooling effect will not be enough to prevent this year from becoming another of the warmest in human history, climate scientists predicted. This La Niña could instead demonstrate just how high the baseline of average global temperatures has shifted.

“We’ve reached the stage where every year is an anomalously hot year,” said Gavin Schmidt, a climate scientist and director of the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies. “They’re all different, statistically, than the climate we grew up with.”

In the United States, La Niña is known for warm and dry winter conditions across the country’s southern tier, and wet and snowy conditions from the Pacific Northwest to the northern Plains. While cold and snow across the East tends to be less likely during La Niña, Johnson said the pattern could bear some responsibility for drought that rapidly developed across the eastern third of the country in the fall of last year, fueling a spate of wildfires across the Northeast.

What’s unusual about this La Niña

The latest episode of La Niña emerged in December, based on observations of slightly cooler-than-normal sea surface temperatures along the equator in the central and east-central Pacific, according to NOAA’s Climate Prediction Center.

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