AL.com posted a story yesterday with the title above looking ahead to the future as El Niño reaches its peak intensity and starts to decline. What happens after a strong El Niño starts to fade? Keep in mind that it will take months for the mass of unusually warm water in the Eastern Pacific Ocean disappears, so impacts are going to continue through the winter and into spring as well. But eventually it will go back to neutral conditions, and what happens next will impact agriculture next growing season.
David Zierden, the Florida State Climatologist, provided a look at what has happened at the end of previous strong El Niños in his briefing today for the ACF basin. A screen capture of his slide showing what happened in when previous strong El Niños faded away is shown below. In four of the five events, the pattern swung to the opposite pattern, a La Niña. We know that in the Southeast La Niñas are often linked to drought as well as active Atlantic tropical seasons, so that farmers should be thinking now about how to deal with both the likelihood of drier than normal conditions as well as the possibility of floods if a tropical storm moves right over their area. The wet conditions through the winter also make it likely that fields will be quite wet in the spring, which could lead to delays in planting.
Regional yield maps from Agroclimate.org indicate that in La Nina years corn and peanuts tend to do well, while soybeans, cotton, and wheat do less well.
