As El Niño Grows Stronger, CA Hit With Bomb Cyclone

CALIFORNIA — El Niño is getting stronger, and it's almost certain to last throughout the winter, the National Weather Service's Climate Prediction Center announced Thursday.

According to the experts, El Niño now has a 95 percent chance of sticking around through the early months of 2024, and it's likely to remain strong. The Climate Prediction Center now says there is a 71 percent chance that El Niño will be strong. Strong El Niño weather patterns tend to correlate with unusually wet winter seasons across much of California. The El Niño pattern typically reaches peak strength between November and January before ending in March.

Since the West Coast entered into an El Niño Cycle this summer, the Golden State has seen an unusual level of precipitation with record rainfall in August. Now, a bomb cyclone is forecasted to soak Northern California this week when an atmospheric river-fueled storm is expected to drop three inches of rain.

Signs of El Niño are all around, especially in the very warm surface temperatures in the Pacific.

"The whole ocean was over 1˚C above the 20th-century average in August, the first time that's happened in the 174-year record," the NOAA explained on its ENSO blog.

"The global climate models we rely on are pretty certain that the currently observed warmer-than-average sea surface temperatures will last and even strengthen through winter 2023–24," according to the weather service's blog. "The continued model confidence is one reason why forecasters have odds of over 70% that the current event will peak as a "strong" El Niño for the November-January average. There is even a 30% chance that Niño-3.4 values exceed 2.0˚C by this winter, which would put ocean temperatures in a tier with some of the strongest El Niños since 1950."

The last two El Niño summer conditions on par with this year occurred just prior to two winters with major storms including 1997 and 2015, according to the weather service.

"Remember those events? Pretty big El Niños," the weather service concluded.

After three consecutive La Niña winters, El Niño — the warmer phase of the El Niño Southern Oscillation (ENSO) — arrived early in June. The opposing climate patterns are a departure from normal conditions in the Pacific and can have global impacts on the jet stream and weather, particularly during the winter months in the United States.

According to National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, El Niño causes the Pacific jet stream to shift south and spread east, which is usually associated with warmer and drier winter conditions in northern states and wetter conditions in the South and Southwest, including much of California.

Patch Staffer Lucas Combos contributed to this report.