How El Niño could impact the rest of winter and into spring in ND when compared to long-term trends

BISMARCK, N.D. (KFYR) – El Niño usually means milder winter temperatures in the Northern Plains and that was certainly the case in December. But what might be in store for the rest of winter and even into spring?

El Niño’s signal of warmth in the Pacific Ocean is evident and its strength is a big factor in our long-term outlook. But it’s not the only one.

We average out the past 30 years to get our climate normals, but those change over time.

“I think people who have lived in North Dakota for a while now have really started to notice the shifting of the seasons that we’re seeing with those longer-term trends. Warming in the fall and extending the plant season on that end with the harvest. But then winter seems to stick around in the spring a lot longer than we want it to and it’s kind of delaying that spring plant season,” said Megan Jones, a meteorologist at the Bismarck National Weather Service.

“When you look at the winter as a whole, there’s not really a strong trend across North Dakota. When you start looking at the month-by-month, December is pretty neutral, January’s warming a little bit, but then you start to see a strong cooling trend in February, specifically. And I think if you’re thinking back to the past couple of winters, it seems like February is always the worst month. And then as we go into the spring, when we got the new climate normals for 1991-2020, there was a pretty noticeable cooling trend,” said Jones.

The peak of El Niño might be occurring, which needs to be closely monitored to overcome the long-term climate trends.

“If the El Niño is strong enough to kind of keep us a little bit warmer and maybe shake off winter sooner than what we’ve had the past couple years, but sometimes the longer-term trends win out and we’ll be stuck with not quite spring conditions a little bit longer than we want,” said Jones.

The current outlook still slightly favors above normal temperatures, but as you get further into the spring season, that probability really starts to lessen.

“There’s always talk about warm and dry, cold and wet. A lot of the time, we don’t get those paired together necessarily. One of the things that we’ve seen from the historical El Niños, the stronger ones, the past two strong El Niños have been warm in the spring but they’ve also been wet. So it doesn’t necessarily mean snow, but it also doesn’t necessarily mean dry,” said Jones.

Even if it’s rain, hopefully, that helps farmers to get into the fields sooner in the spring and ranchers with calving than the past two years that featured blizzards in April.

Near normal precipitation is expected for late winter and into spring, but it only takes the track of one storm to make a difference.

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