By Robert Burns
Texas A&M AgriLife
The forecast of rains for Texas this week will be music to many farmers and ranchers ears, but the coming stormy weather is not the main El Niño event, according to a climatologist.
It’s more like a prelude, said Dr. John Nielsen-Gammon, state climatologist and Regents Professor at Texas A&M University, College Station.
Texas is sure to get some rainfall, Nielsen-Gammon said. There’s an upper-level disturbance moving into the southwest, and a tropical cyclone in the Pacific off the coast of Mexico should feed some moisture into the state. Though El Niño may be contributing to the storms, it’s not the beginning of the main activity–the near-normal to wetter-than-normal fall and winter that climatologists are expecting.
“Everything is impacted by El Niño in some way or another,” he said. “Some aspects of this weather pattern are consistent with what we expect with an El Niño. We have a fairly active subtropical jet stream developing, which is what brings the wet weather to Texas in the wintertime. The tropical cyclone activity over the eastern Pacific is also characteristic of El Niño.”
But the coming wet weather doesn’t mean things have been normal so far, he said. At least 22 counties in Texas have received record low rainfall in the past 90 days. Rainfall the third week in October may help, but it is only expected to average about 2 inches statewide, which may not be enough to end the drought many parts of the state are experiencing.
“In Texas, we never really have ‘normal’ weather,” Nielsen-Gammon said. “But some of the strongest El Niños in the past have been associated with dry Septembers and Octobers. So it’s not too surprising this time around that we have to wait until later in October for enhanced rainfall chances. That’s actually how it normally works. We don’t usually get a big impact from El Niño until the jet stream is far enough south to affect our weather.”