El Niño vs. The Blob: A preview of weather to come

VANCOUVER (NEWS 1130) – Warm and dry: two words that sum up our year so far in weather.

But is it a sure sign of global warming?

And with the El Niño phenomenon ramping up toward record levels, will the trend continue into the coming winter?

“We can expect certain things, statistically, with a strong El Niño,” says Cliff Mass, a professor in the Department of Atmospheric Sciences at the University of Washington.

“We tend to be a little bit warmer than normal, we tend to be a little drier than normal and the snowpack in the Cascades of Washington and into British Columbia tend to be 20 to 30 per cent lower than normal.”

That’s actually good news for skiers and snowboarders, in that we likely won’t see a repeat of snowless slopes on the North Shore mountains.

“The cause of our strange weather over the last year is a big area of high pressure — what we call a ridge — over the western part of North America. That produced ‘The Blob,'” he tells NEWS 1130.

‘The Blob’ is a mass of warm water in the North Pacific that produced a hot dry winter on the West Coast.

“What’s going to happen with the strong El Niño developing is that it will work against this high pressure and I would suspect The Blob is going to die and we are not going to see as extreme a year as last year.”

Mass predicts more precipitation — particularly more snow — in the months ahead. “It will be below normal, but last year was crazy below normal and I don’t think that’s going to happen again.”

Mass calls the recent weird weather an “anomaly” that is in no way connected to climate change.

“What we’ve seen is an outlier. There is no reason to expect that what has happened in the last year or two has anything to do with climate change,” he says.

“But on the other hand it gives us an idea of what climate change will bring. The temperatures and the snowpack we saw last year are very much like the conditions we’d expect later this century. This is the weather of 2070, today.”

While there may not be as much snow as in a typical year for the local slopes, the ski hills are hopeful for a much better season ahead.

The rain gauge is certainly half-full for marketing manager Ainslie Fincham at Grouse Mountain. She says some of their biggest snow years have been El Niño years, and even if they don’t get a huge dump this winter, they are making preparations.

“We’ve done things like significantly augment our snow-making and this will enable us to provide top-to-bottom mountain coverage. We’ve also been working hard on our summer grooming, doing things that will help people ski on significantly less snow.”

Whistler Blackcomb is coming off one of the worst winters in 45 years, weather-wise, but the resort’s marketing manager Stuart Rempel says even in a low-snow year, they still have plenty of terrain open in the high-alpine and they still had the best attendance of any ski resort on the continent last season.

This year?

“We’ll wait and see. The Farmers Almanac says the Pacific Northwest is going to get hammered with snow, so there are lots of different points of view out there,” he laughs.

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