Here's What Texans Needs To Know About El Nino

El Nino is coming to Texas and it will bring rain, cold and maybe even snow with it.

“El Nino is already in place,” Joe Arellano, meteorologist-in-charge at the National Weather Service’s Austin/San Antonio division, told Patch.

But it’s the fall and winter months when the weather phenomenon will be at its strongest, he said, creating more cloud cover and cooler temperatures. There’s a 90 percent chance that the event will last into the spring of next year.

“For the area of Texas during El Nino, we usually expect wetter than normal conditions and cooler than normal conditions,” Arellano said.

What’s more troubling is that Arellano and his team of forecasters say this year’s El Nino could be the third worst since the 1950s.

The worst on record was in 1986-1987, when El Nino peaked twice that season. And many blame El Nino on the disastrous February flooding in California in 1998. That El Nino led to one of the coldest and wettest winters on record in Texas.

The phenomenon, which can affect temperatures and rainfall across the country, is not very well understood. Every two to seven years the waters of the equatorial Pacific Ocean warm for periods that can stretch up to 18 months. This year the warming began in June and has steadily increased since then, leading to more thunderstorms heading east instead of west.

El Nino does not drive the weather by itself, which depends on many other local conditions, but it can at times have a pronounced effect on seasonal trends.

This could be good news for the persistent drought, though. Despite the torrential rains that much of the state experienced earlier this year, the subsequent dry, hot months have returned nearly half of Texas to drought status. A rainy fall and winter could finally put an end to the dry spell which has plagued the state since 2010.

[PHOTO: Image vis Shutterstock]