Climate Readers Say
La Niña On The Way

BOULDER, Colo. —(AP)— Climate experts from around the world gathered in Boulder last week for a summit on the weather phenomenon La Niña, El Niño's cool sister.

Rather than a warming of the central Pacific waters, La Niña is a cooling of the Pacific's eastern equatorial waters.

Some early forecasts say La Niña will bring a cold, wet winter to the Pacific Northwest and a warmer winter to the Southeast, the Midwest's tornado activity probably will intensify, more hurricanes are anticipated in the Atlantic, and the "lake effect" snows should return to Buffalo, New York.

However, "El Niño and La Niña do not affect all of the country," said Jim O'Brien, director of the Center for Ocean-Atmospheric Prediction Studies at Florida State University. "There are huge places in the United States that don't care about the South Pacific" weather phenomena.

In the past month, central Pacific Ocean temperatures plummeted eight degrees Celsius, a drop that one scientist called the first signal of a La Niña.

The trade winds strengthened in early May, causing deep cold waters to "explode to the surface like a slow-motion volcano," said Mike McPhaden, a meteorologist with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.

Cooler air radiating off of the water disrupted the atmosphere and affected the jet stream. Rainfall stopped. "This is a developing La Niña," McPhaden said.

The international La Niña Summit conducted last week at the National Center for Atmospheric Research was exploring the weather phenomenon with an eye to improving forecasts so people can brace for the impacts.

Marty Hoerling, a NOAA meteorologist, gave a Colorado forecast.

"Last winter it was somewhat mundane ... That is going to be a different story this year. In Colorado, we'll have more extreme (cold) temperatures from week to week, although I don't know whether it will be cold all winter," Hoerling said. "This winter, it's back to reality."

But Hoerling cautioned, "80 percent of our weather is not explained by what is happening in the Pacific."