U.S. forecaster sees La Niña likely to persist in coming months

Reading Time: < 1 minute

Published: November 10, 2016

,

NEW YORK, Nov 10 (Reuters) – A U.S. government weather forecaster on Thursday said that previously predicted La Niña conditions have arrived and are slightly favored to persist into the Northern Hemisphere winter 2016-17.
The Climate Prediction Center (CPC), an agency of the National Weather Service, in a monthly forecast said it observed La Niña conditions during October and sees a 55 percent chance they will persist through the winter.
Last month, the agency pegged the chance of La Nina developing this fall at 70 percent.
La Niña will likely raise temperatures and reduce precipitation in the southern United States and do the opposite across the northern part of the country, the CPC said.

Read Also

Young women from across Ontario kept food production going during the war under the farmerette program. Photo: We Lend a Hand.

Women who fed a nation

More than 40,000 young women supported the war effort between the 1940s and early 1950s, helping grow and harvest crops amid labour shortages. They were called Farmerettes.

La Niña is characterized by unusually cold ocean temperatures in the equatorial Pacific Ocean and tends to occur unpredictably every two to seven years. Severe occurrences have been linked to floods and droughts.
Japan’s weather bureau repeated in its monthly forecast on Tuesday that it estimated that there was a 60 percent possibility that the La Nina weather pattern would last through the winter months of December to February.
There was a 40 percent chance that it would return to normal conditions during the winter, it added.

explore

Stories from our other publications