La NINA

In the equatorial regions of the Pacific ocean, a cooling trend of the waters off the coast of South America and a warming trend of the water tempertures in the far Pacific has been taking place. This is known as La Nina conditions. The map above highlights the region of blue off the South american coast where termperatures are some 3 to 4 C below average.

In essence, with sinking air off the South American coast, the weather becomes more quiet in the region as storm systems tend to get deflected northward making the Pacific Northwest wetter than average. Historically, with La Nina conditions in place our weather will trend on the dry and warm side. As long as we get cold and snowy at least once, dry and warm is fine by me.

Posted by Ted Zarras at 3:28 PM