How La Niña could impact Tennessee’s winter

NASHVILLE, Tenn. (WKRN) — Even though winter is still several months away, the Climate Prediction Center has issued a La Niña watch for November through January.

La Niña is the cold phase of the El Niño Southern Oscillation, which is an ocean current in the Pacific near the equator.

When the sea surface temperatures in the eastern Pacific are warmer than average it is El Niño and when they are colder than normal it is La Niña.

It’s hard to believe, but the ocean temperatures in the equatorial Pacific have a large impact on the winter weather in the United States.

Typically during a La Niña winter temperatures are cooler with more snowfall in the northern states, while the southeast is warmer and drier than average.

In the midsouth, the trends aren’t as obvious.

Looking back at all the Nashville winters since 1950 that coincided with La Niña, about half of them featured above and below-average temperatures. Snow totals were similar.

Tom Di Liberto a scientist at the Climate Predictions Center said snow lovers shouldn’t lose their hope.

“If you’re a snow lover and you’re hoping for a lot of snow this winter, I wouldn’t worry too much about whether it’s going to be El Niño or La Niña necessarily because, again, all you need is that one storm,” said Di Liberto.

Winter 2023-2024 was the perfect example of that. The whole winter’s worth of snow fell in two days. Nashville recorded 7.6″ on January 14-15th. That was nearly double the average for the entire winter, which is 4.2″.

Di Liberto said the El Niño Southern Oscillation is one of the only climate scale influences that scientists can forecast relatively accurately, and that’s why so many meteorologists use it to make seasonal outlooks.

Here in Middle Tennessee and Southern Kentucky, it is difficult to determine if we are going to have a cold or mild winter based on La Niña.

Di Liberto said his best guess is we will have warmer-than-average temperatures with slightly above-average precipitation.

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