Nebraska climate officials are keeping an eye on El Niño, and its potential impact on the Midwest

Parts of Nebraska are devastatingly dry right now, prompting some to look forward to the incoming El Niño weather pattern. Nebraska Public Media’s Dale Johnson spoke with the Nebraska State Climate Office’s Eric Hunt about what’s lurking around the corner.

Eric Hunt: Well, I’ve heard lots of things to describe the pending El Niño. Super El Niño I think has been the most common one. The prognosis is certainly that we’re going to be into a stronger El Niño.

Dale Johnson: Most of the El Niño stories that I’ve found tend to focus on hurricanes, and Nebraska doesn’t get too many of those.

Hunt: That would be a first.

Johnson: So let’s talk about tornadoes. Does an El Niño weather pattern lend itself to more tornadoes?

Hunt: It could, I mean, I would just say El Niño’s impacts on our sensible weather tend to be strongest starting in September, October, going through the winter and into at least early portion of the spring of the next year. So I think our biggest impacts from this El Niño are going to be probably the very tail end of summer into the next one, early spring. That being said, it would certainly be possible, given the fact that we would likely have a stormier pattern this fall than we’ve had in recent years, which wouldn’t take much for a lot of the state to be stormier than we’ve been in recent falls. So that may open up the possibility for more chances for severe weather, including tornadoes. That may mean next spring might be the one we really have to watch out for. For example, 2024 we did actually have a couple tornado outbreaks in this portion of the country, the Arbor Day tornado outbreak was probably the most prominent one. That was the first tornado outbreak we’d had here in about 10 years. That was coming off at El Niño, so I would say next spring might be the year that we really would want to watch out for more severe weather, including tornadoes, in this portion of the country.

Johnson: So these patterns last more than a year?

Hunt: El Niño tends to peak in what we call the boreal winter, so the northern hemisphere winter, so it probably would peak sometime between Christmas, Martin Luther King Jr. Day, Valentine’s Day, and then would start slowly weakening as we head into next summer, and then it would maybe go back to more neutral conditions, or maybe even flip over to a La Nina, but the impacts from El NNiño do tend to stick around for a while, so I would anticipate starting to see some impacts from it. I think we’re already starting to see some impacts from El Niño development. I think they’ll pick up a little bit the summer, then they’ll really be noticeable, at least to a point, in fall, winter, and into next spring.

Johnson: What does an El Niño do to temperatures and precipitation?

Hunt: We tend to get better chances of rain, so we don’t often have major drought development during a summer where we’re going in El Niño. We tend to get some precipitation. We also tend to be about average, maybe some cases a little bit cooler on temperatures. We can get some severe weather. Getting into the fall, I think we do tend to be a bit wetter and sometimes cooler than average in October. We often obtain those really mild winters during a strong El Niño by having a lot of days, the highs of the upper 30s to mid-upper 40s, lows in the maybe the low 20s in this part of the state, maybe further west it’ll be a little bit colder, so it’s not necessarily that just T-shirt weather. It often can actually be kind of damp and to some degree kind of miserable, but we just don’t tend to have as much of the 10 to 15 to 20-below air temperatures and really cold wind chills, but that doesn’t mean we wouldn’t necessarily get more snow than we’ve had in recent years, too. If we have more active weather patterns, we could certainly see some more snowfall, and for the western portion of the state and getting in the front range, I cannot stress how critical it will be that we actually have decent moisture this fall, going this next winter, because if we don’t, next spring, next summer may be even worse in that portion of the state and that portion of the country in general.

Johnson: How does El Niño affect agriculture?

Hunt: Well, in this part of the world, it actually tends to be favorable because we tend to get decent summer moisture during the summers we’re going into an El Niño, and often the year following, depending on how quickly we transition into neutral or La Nina. The next growing season can be decent, too, in terms of getting adequate spring moisture so we actually have good moisture, a decent reserve of moisture for the corn, soybean crop, wheat crops often do fairly well, sorghum would have a pretty good year. But elsewhere in the world though, El Niño can be a major issue, because El Niño does tend to cause more drought in places like Australia, Indonesia, India, parts of Sub-Saharan Africa can also be very dry, so there are some bread baskets that do tend to be kind of dry. One concern I do have is other parts of the world where you tend to have less industrialized agriculture than we have here. With regards to efficiencies, they’re more vulnerable to drought than we are here in the U.S., and I am very concerned about drought being a major issue in, say Kenya, India, parts of China this summer. I do think it’s possible we have to start maybe thinking about the possibility of famine. I don’t say that lightly, but if we do see what’s happened in some years, or we just have a very late onset of the monsoon in India, for example, we could be very, very dry in parts of Australia, so that may really impact some global staple crops like corn and wheat.

Johnson: To circle back to where we began before we end our conversation here. Eric, how do you know the day when you go to work that El Niño has begun?

Hunt: The most official way is NOAA and other global centers that follow sea surface temperature anomalies in the upper winds, the lower part of the atmosphere, say we are already a full blown El Niño. I believe we already have met the criteria for El Niño, but once they say it’s official, then it is truly official.

Johnson: Happy El Niño to you, Eric.

Hunt: Thank you, Dale.

Johnson: Eric Hunt from the State Climate Office, joining me for the conversation on Nebraska Public Media. I’m Dale Johnson.