With the monsoon season upon us, and a heat dome over much of the United States, KRWG Multimedia Journalist Noah Raess hears from Anthony Brown, lead meteorologist from the National Weather Service in Santa Teresa, to learn more about these systems and what they mean for rain chances.
Noah Raess:
I guess my first question is, can you just tell us a little bit about El Niño and what is kind of unique about this year?
Anthony Brown:
So yeah, El Niño is when the waters off the equatorial Pacific, so Ecuador and Peru, are above normal. And that causes changes in the global wind patterns. So it weakens the easterly flow toward the equator, which allows the waters around the equator to warm up. And then, as I said, that alters the global patterns. Now, typically it has more of an effect, especially for North America. And our weather here on our wintertime pattern. But how it may affect our summertime pattern is when we have an El Niño, it tends to make the tropical Pacific hurricane season more active. And the more storms you have in the eastern Pacific, some of that moisture will get fed into our monsoon, and it can enhance our monsoon. So what's going to be different about this El Niño is it's particularly strong, just how strong it will get this winter is, you know, still a little uncertain, but it could be possibly historically strong. What defines an El Niño is when the waters off the Pacific or equatorial Pacific are at least half a degree Celsius, or about one degree Fahrenheit above normal. And this year, it could be as much as 2 or 2 and a half degrees above normal, which would be about 3 or 4, maybe five degrees above normal Fahrenheit. And so with it being particularly strong, it's going to have more notable effects, not just here locally, but across the entire globe.
Noah Raess:
Just looking at our monsoon season coming up, a lot of people are interested in how much rain is this area going to get. Do you have any predictions on how this monsoon season is looking like and how much rain might we get?
Anthony Brown:
So it's going to be impossible to say how much rain we'll get precisely just because the rain is so hit or miss. I mean, some places could get just ridiculous amounts of rainfall and then a few miles away, just for whatever reason, by random chance, you don't get that much chance. But if you average everything out, we probably will have an above normal monsoon. It's right now looking like Arizona will probably be a little bit wetter than us, but here in southern New Mexico, Las Cruces, El Paso area, it should be a wetter monsoon. It might be off to a little bit slower start as a lot of people have noticed, June was kind of wet. So far, we haven't seen much this July. That's unusual for these El Niño patterns. But as we get more and more into the monsoon, especially August and maybe even September, we expect it to be wetter than normal as a whole. Of course, one risk we're all familiar with is sometimes those winds will kick up blowing dust and can cause poor visibility. But the other hazard that comes with the monsoon is heavy rainfall. We get a lot of street flooding in El Paso and Las Cruces, and if you see a flooded road, don't attempt to cross it. Try to find another way home. And if you're in doubt, definitely don't try to cross that. Water is almost always deeper than it looks. And if it's a bridge that's like going over an arroyo, over a creek and covered in water, there's the risk that that bridge has been washed out. So we have a saying with the wet National Weather Service, it's turn around, don't drown. It's better to find a new route home and arrive 15 minutes late than to not arrive at all. And the other thing about that, too, is if somebody has to rescue you, you're also endangering the lives of the firefighters or first responders who are having to rescue. So, you know, if you fear for the road roadway, we just we beg you to please find a new route. Don't try to cross it.
Noah Raess:
And looking at our winter, can you just kind of expand on how El Niño affects the weather here in southern New Mexico during the winter?
Anthony Brown:
So typically, on average, we tend to be near normal in terms of temperatures or a little cooler than normal and most years, but not every year, we tend to be wetter than normal. And that is because there's a jet stream that tends to show up more in winter, called the Subtropical Jet, and that tends to form, or jet stream, I should say that tends to form toward the international border. And if it tends to shift a little bit more over Mexico, that can put us on the water side of storms. But if it's a little bit further north, that can also bring a bit more wind during the winter as well. So, more than likely it's going to be more active in the sense that we might have a few more wind events during the winter, but it also puts us at a better chance of seeing a bit more wetter than normal winter. But keep in mind our winters, our springs aren't particularly wet anyway, so it doesn't take a whole lot to make us above normal. And not every El Niño behaves the same. For example, last year we were La Niña, which we should have been drier than normal, but we had that big storm come through in January and it made us well above normal. So because it's so dry here, because we're a desert, all it takes is one event anyway.
Noah Raess:
And moving over to the heat dome, I've been seeing a lot of news about this heat dome that's been forming. Can you tell us about that and what is a heat dome?
Anthony Brown:
So a heat dome does occur every summer. It's basically what happens every year or every summer in North America, we get a large area of high pressure aloft. And it's basically just an area where the air is sinking and where the air is sinking, it gets hot. And plus we just have the high something or anyway, because it's July. So every year we do get a heat dome. What's unusual about this one is, we have seen highs this strong before, but they're usually down in our neck of the woods. They're usually further south. We don't usually get highs this strong over the Northern Plains. So it's bringing historical heat to the northern Plains in the upper Midwest. But conversely, for us, because moisture works around these highs in a clockwise fashion, then it's making it so that we're getting more moisture from the Gulf and it's allowing some systems to move from east to west.
