The La Niña weather pattern can cause droughts in the southern United States, including parts of eastern Texas. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.
Two new NOAA-funded studies from scientists at The University of Texas at Austin have significantly improved scientists’ ability to predict the strength and duration of droughts caused by La Niña – a recurrent cooling pattern in the tropical Pacific Ocean. Their findings, which predict that the current La Niña is likely to stretch into a second year, could help scientists know years in advance how a particular La Niña event is expected to evolve.
“Some La Niña events last two years, and predicting them is extremely challenging,” said Pedro DiNezio, a research associate at the University of Texas Institute for Geophysics (UTIG).
The studies were funded by NOAA Research’s Modeling, Analysis, Predictions, and Projections Program (MAPP) in support of the National Integrated Drought Information System (NIDIS) development, and recently published in the journal Geophysical Research Letters.
The southern United States regularly experiences warm and dry winters, which are closely linked to La Niña. Because La Niña can make drought and other extreme events more likely to occur, better understanding and predictions of multi-year La Niña events could save the U.S. billions of dollars in damage costs each year.
The first study, led by Yuko Okumura, shows that La Niña’s impact on atmospheric circulation and southern U.S. drought becomes stronger in the second year of a two-year event. This is despite a weakening of La Niña’s cooling over the tropical Pacific relative to the first year.
“We expected a weaker impact in the second year, but it turned out to be the opposite,” said Okumura. “Despite being weaker in the second year, La Niña appears to have a greater impact.”
Computer models show predicted and observed rainfall anomalies around the globe during the second year of La Niña events, including a future prediction for 2018. Predicted values are on the left and observed on the right. The rainfall anomaly refers to the deviation in rainfall during a particular year compared to the expected rainfall for the region. Pedro DiNezio/University of Texas Institute for Geophysics/ Jackson School of Geosciences.
Okumura’s team found that this paradox is caused by subtle changes in the pattern of tropical Pacific cooling. During the second year, the cooling weakens in a narrow band along the equator, but becomes broader. The broader cooling appears more effective at influencing the atmosphere far away from the tropical Pacific, according to analysis of historical observations.
“Predicting if La Niña will last multiple years is therefore essential to knowing how long the drought will last,” Okumura said.
The second study, led by DiNezio, used a climate model developed at the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) to predict that an ongoing La Niña that started in 2016 will stretch into its second year this upcoming winter. The model puts the probability of such a two-year event occurring at 60 to 80 percent.
DiNezio and Okumura had previously found that a La Niña is more likely to last two years when it is preceded by a strong El Niño – its warm counterpart. Therefore, when a record-breaking El Niño event occurred just two years ago, they anticipated that it could lead to a two-year La Niña. DiNezio used the model developed at NCAR to test this idea.
To back their predictions, they tested whether the model could have predicted previous two-year La Niña events that occurred after strong El Niños. They were particularly confident in the model when they saw that it predicted the three-year La Niña following the 1997 El Niño, a record-breaking event at the time.
So far, it looks like the NCAR model’s prediction is on the money. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) announced last week that ocean conditions in the tropical Pacific are starting to show signs that La Niña is on its way for a second year.
DiNezio and Okumura will be keeping a close eye on this year’s La Niña as they seek to better predict its impacts throughout the world.
Both papers are from a project supported by MAPP in partnership with the NIDIS program as part of the NOAA Drought Task Force and represent significant advances in our ability to understand and predict La Niña-driven droughts over the southern U.S.
To learn more, read the papers published in Geophysical Research Letters:
Yuko Okumura, a research associate at the University of Texas Institute for Geophysics. The University of Texas Institute for Geophysics/Jackson School of Geosciences.
Okumura et al.: http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/2017GL075034/full
Pedro DiNezio, a research associate at the University of Texas Institute for Geophysics. University of Texas Institute for Geophysics/Jackson School of Geosciences
DiNezio et al.: http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/2017GL074904/full#publication-history