It looks like a La Niña winter. What does that mean for the ski season?

Could the 2024-25 winter season bring big snow? The short answer is maybe. Isn’t that always the answer?

The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration issued a La Niña watch , giving La Niña conditions a 71% chance to emerge from September to November and continue from January to March 2025.

La Niña has been a dominant weather force in recent years. The three consecutive La Niña years from 2020 to 2023 mark only the third time in the past 73 years that has happened, according to OnTheSnow meteorologist Chris Tomer.

And the 2022-23 season was a whopper. Resorts in the West, particularly in California and Utah, had all-time snowfall totals, with Alta leading the way in the Beehive State with a record 903 inches.

A La Niña winter this year would mark the fourth such event in five years.

The Pacific Northwest, northern tier states, and Canada stand to benefit the most from a La Niña pattern. But that’s not always the case as the 2022-23 winter showed, according to Tomer. Past La Niña patterns, though, provide some context and guidance for what such a winter could hold.

“Regardless of how the upcoming La Niña materializes, you can count on snow. Time will tell just how much snow that North America will see,” according to Tomer.

Farmers’ Almanac winter forecast

The Farmers’ Almanac , a 200-plus-year-old publication originally written to help agriculturists plan for the planting of crops that provides a winter forecast every August, also has a take on the coming winter.

“The astronomical start of winter begins with the winter solstice on Saturday, Dec. 21, 2024. This winter, La Niña, which refers to the periodic cooling of ocean surface temperatures in the central and eastern equatorial Pacific, is expected to develop and hang on through the season. Taking into account the effect La Niña has on the weather, along with our longstanding formula, we anticipate the winter of 2024-25 will be wet and cold for most locations,” according to the almanac.

But the almanac predicts an average season in California, Idaho and Utah, both in temperature and precipitation and a wetter and slightly chillier-than-average winter in Washington and Oregon.

The publication is “red flagging” the last week of January over most of the eastern half of the country because of a very active storm track it expects will deliver frequent heavy precipitation along with strong and gusty winds. Specifically, Jan. 20-23 and Jan. 24-27 could see lots of snow, rain, sleet and ice.