Experts Predict End of Drought on West Coast

Drought conditions on the Pacific Coast may be coming to an end with a winter that is likely to be colder and wetter than usual, two La Jolla weather researchers said Friday.

Jerome Namias and Dan Cayan of the Experimental Climate Forecast Center at UC San Diego’s Scripps Institution of Oceanography in La Jolla, said they anticipate heavier than normal precipitation over most of the nation, except for the Eastern Seaboard and much of the Southwest.

“This pattern of precipitation marks a major change from the drought pattern that plagued most of the nation last summer and the dry conditions that gripped the West during the past two winters,” said Namias, an expert on the role oceans play in global weather.

“Heavy rains are expected in the West Coast states, with snows at higher elevations.”

Normal for Southland

As for Southern California, however, Namias and Cayan said it probably will have normal wintertime precipitation and temperature readings. So, they believe, will southern Nevada, western Arizona and other parts of the southwestern United States.

The researchers stressed that their forecast simply deals with average temperatures and precipitation expected during the entire December-to-February period and is not a detailed day-by-day breakdown.

Namias said the forecast “hinges upon the tendency for the low pressure in the Gulf of Alaska to strengthen more than usual.”

He said the gulf’s storm activity already has begun and “there are indications that it will be encouraged to persist by a pool of warmer-than-normal water in the central North Pacific Ocean and a swath of cooler-than-normal water along the West Coast.”

Other factors he cited “are the strong trade winds and cooler-than-normal sea surface temperatures in much of the equatorial Pacific.”

Cayan said he and Namias feel that conditions in the North Pacific will produce frontal systems that will push across the West Coast, bringing plenty of rain as well as cold air.