In recent climate news all of the attention has been on the upcoming winter and what to expect from El Niño. Most predictions show that we should start the growing season with plenty of soil moisture, and perhaps so much that field work is delayed in spring. But many farmers are also wondering what the summer after a strong El Niño is like. My friend Laura Edwards, SDSU Extension Climate Field Specialist, put out an article last week describing the conditions to expect there. You can find her article at https://igrow.org/news/summertime-climate-after-an-el-nino-winter/.
In the article Laura presents two precipitation maps for the summers after two strong El Niño events: 1983 and 1998. Since they are national maps, we can also use these maps to look at the impacts in the Southeast. If you look at the precipitation maps below, you can see that generally the Southeast is drier than normal in these two years for May through September, but there are some differences, particularly in the areas near the Gulf of Mexico.
The reason for the differences becomes more clear if you look at the paths of tropical storms each year, which I found at Wikipedia. In 1983 there were few Atlantic tropical storms and the ones that occurred made landfall in the western Gulf. By comparison, in 1998 several of the storms made landfall in the southern Gulf region, resulting in wetter conditions in southern Alabama and southwest Georgia.
These are just two analog years, and so there is going to be a degree of uncertainty in determining what kind of summer we are likely to see next year. But based on these two years, I think the chance of a drier than normal summer is higher than usual. This will be particularly true if the El Niño dies out quickly and switches into a La Niña, which is the opposite phase of the oscillation. La Niñas are often associated with droughts in the Southeast. What you see at your local area is going to depend critically on whether or not you receive tropical storm moisture during the growing season.
Another clue comes from the Climate Prediction Center, which indicates in the bottom map that there is an enhanced chance of above normal temperatures in the August through October 2016 time frame, late in the growing season. That would be likely to contribute to drought if the tropical storms stay away. It’s a long way in the future, but it bears watching.
