A Pacific Ocean La Nina Is Confirmed

Climate experts meeting in Atlanta confirmed the start of La Nina -- a cooling of the tropical Pacific Ocean that often coincides with stronger hurricanes, a wetter Pacific Northwest and a drier South.

The event will probably last through late spring and possibly through the summer, said Edward Alan O’Lenic, chief of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s Climate Prediction Center.

The center confirmed jet stream changes and lower-than-normal water temperatures in parts of the Pacific Ocean in the last three months, O’Lenic said at a meeting of the American Meteorological Society.