How Will ‘Super El Niño’ Affect Mid-Michigan this Winter?
Chances are high this winter that your dreams of a white Christmas just won’t become a reality.
According to the National Weather Service’s Bob Dukesherer, there is a 70% chance that the United States will experience the strongest El Niño in recorded history. The climate pattern has already had global impacts, and is expected to bring higher temperatures and less snowfall to mid-Michigan this winter.
“El Niño is identified by warmer-than-normal sea-surface temperatures over the central or eastern equatorial Pacific basin,” Senior Academic Specialist Ryan Shadbolt in Michigan State University’s Department of Geography, Environment, and Spatial Sciences told East Lansing Info over email. “It is coupled with changes to the atmosphere above, which we call the Southern Oscillation.”
El Niño events occur on a cycle every two to seven years, Shadbolt said.
“As easterly trade winds along the equator weaken, there is less upwelling of deeper, cold water along the western coast of South America,” he said. “The result is the accumulation of warm water over the central or eastern equatorial Pacific.”
For mid-Michigan, this means a winter that is warmer and drier than normal.
“There’s been about 10 strong or very strong El Niños dating back to 1950,” Dukesherer, a senior forecaster for the Grand Rapids National Weather Service branch, told ELi in a phone interview. “They have all related to temperatures significantly above normal, snowfall being well below average, and precipitation either near or below normal.”
Dukesherer said there will still be cold snaps and periods of snow, but nothing like what our area traditionally experiences during winter.
Some may applaud this because it means less snow shoveling and lower heating bills this winter, but it also means less revenue for a state where winter-based tourism and activities help drive the economy.
A mild 2023-24 Michigan winter, another El Niño year, resulted in a $40 million loss for the state’s ski communities.
Shadbolt said the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s Climate Prediction Center has observed a 3-degree Celsius increase in sea-surface temperature, something commensurate with other strong El Niño events.
“However, subsurface temperature observations reflect that the warm water is extending to a greater depth than typical, with anomalies exceeding +10.0 degrees Celsius,” he wrote in his email. “Long-term temperature observations of Earth’s ocean volume confirm that our ocean has warmed over recent decades. In our warmer world, it is entirely possible that El Niño events will grow more frequent and more intense.”