Storm-feeding La Niña poised to cycle back in
El Niño brings strong winter cold fronts. La Niña opens the door to tropical storms and hurricanes.
They swing like a pendulum, with neutral conditions typically occurring between the two extremes.
This year La Niña will take over just in time for the tropical summer season, meaning that at least one factor favors hurricane development.
“A lot of times these episodes will cycle back and forth between the two and that’s what we’ll see,” said Ernie Jillson, a meteorologist for the National Weather Service in Ruskin, which covers the Fort Myers-Lee County area. “We’ll see La Nina develop.”
Jillson said the El Niño brings more turbulent winter fronts while La Niña creates conditions that are more conducive to tropical development.
“With El Niño, in the winter it gives us a lot more energy in the jet stream and there’s more impacts with severe weather,” Jillson said. “The neutral phase doesn’t impact us as much. El Niño was particularly strong this year, and we had a lot of strong cold fronts. And the stronger the event the more likely it is that we have severe winter weather.”
NWS: La Niña will be in place by hurricane season
La Niña, on the flip side, doesn’t bring an increased chance of severe weather on a day-to-day basis, but it opens the door to tropical development.
Other factors to look out for as we near the hurricane season is Atlantic Ocean surface temperatures, which are running warmer than average for this time of year.
One place La Niña could help is with Lake Okeechobee levels.
La Niña tends to bring drier weather to this region, and those types of conditions could allow more evaporation in the Lake Okeechobee system.
The lake has been higher than it should be for months now, due in part to recent El Niño rains.
Lake O still above 16 feet
The surface of Lake Okeechobee has since 2008 between kept mostly between 12.5 and 15.5 feet above sea level to provide water for urbanized areas and farming and to prevent flooding in towns and on lands surrounding the lake.
But lake levels were at 16.2 feet above sea level Wednesday, according to U.S. Army Corps of Engineers records.
The Army Corps is in charge of managing the lake and is expected to adopt a new set of Lake Okeechobee management protocols this year.
The seven-day average flows over the past week at the W.P. Franklin Lock and Dam, according to Army Corps records, have been higher than 5,200 cubic feet per second, well above the threshold necessary to cause harm to the Caloosahatchee River estuary.
Flows from the lake are measured mainly at two locations, the Franklin Lock (which separates the estuary from the upstream, freshwater portion of the river) and the Ortona Locks in Moore Haven (which is where the river connects to the lake).
Lake release averages for the Moore Haven location were at 4,193 cubic feet per second Wednesday.
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