El Nino is an occurring pattern of weather conditions affecting climate across the equatorial pacific region. With talk about El Nino building up getting ready to go through the Pacific Northwest this winter, one must wonder what effect that would have on the mountains, and the snow pact that will follow.

According to King 5 News weather station, there is a 70% chance of El Nino having an affect on the Pacific Northwest. Last year there was a great ski season as La Nina provided cold, wet temperatures which contributed to a huge snow pact.

This year, warmer strands of water being seen across the Pacific Ocean leads climatologists to believe that this year’s winter will be warmer than previous years.

El Nino is hard to predict, some winters it provides huge amount of snowfall for Colorado, and other places in the Rocky Mountain chain. In other places it could mean that there will be dry and warm winter conditions.

Through the making of an  El Nino, even though it occurs in the tropical Pacific, it shifts the jet stream. The jet stream, which flows from west to east across the north Pacific Ocean, brings moisture and then dumps it onto the United States.

El Nino is associated with super dry conditions in some regions, and wet, heavy precipitated conditions in other areas. Currently scientists can only make predictions of El Nino having an effect on the winter of 18/19, but there are many ways to be confident in these predictions, “There’s a large monitoring fleet in the tropical Pacific.

There’s an array of buoys across the tropical Pacific called the Tao Buoy Array. They are fixed in place and measure the sea surface temperatures”(Jillian Querie).

These buoys do not provide scientists with a solid knowing of what’s going to happen that winter, currently scientists can only be 60-70% sure of predicting an El nino, but later into the winter season scientists will get more evidence to back up their predictions.

El Nino commonly provides a southward moving shift of snowfall towards the lower states including New Mexico and southern Colorado, this shift normally is associated with less snow in the Pacific Northwest, when the Northeast sees an increase in snowfall.   

Thus far this year El nino has had an occurring affect on the season. Locally, at Whitepass, Washington the snow count has been low with temperatures varying from upper 30’s in the day to lower twenties at night. Because of the close proximity to the pacific ocean whitepass’s weather patterns are very dependent on the winds coming from the ocean. Whitepass opened later this year, compare to normal.

“The snow, however this past previous weekend, was nothing but phenomenal,”(Cade Mathew Kaufman). Cade skied the full opening weekend, including Friday because he’s bout that life.

“This weekend, there were many capital students present at Whitepass shredding the gnar, lots of progression was made and a couple backflips were sent,”(Cade Mathew Kaufman).

To conclude snow count and weather patterns are still of question, despite the lower than average count this year, the skiing that has been present has exceeded standards both personally, and generally.

With more snow to come in the forecast this season should turn out to be more than decent.