Many still-open resorts are saying farewell this weekend to the 24-25 season, which was one of the more consistent winters we’ve had in some time. Despite being a month into spring, winter is still holding on at times, which we’ve seen today with snow falling in the higher elevations of VT, NH & ME.
We’ll see the usual suspects continue on into May (or June)!
As mentioned in the previous blog, we’re looking at a continuation of a neutral ENSO cycle. The first image is the prediction from the International Research Institute of Climate & Society through Columbia University’s Climate School.
This is something I monitored through the season when the majority of models had us barely getting into the La Niña.
In the end, we did not get into a true La Niña this year. For a winter that was expected to be a borderline moderate La Niña (based off projections in early Summer 2004), we started to change this thought in the late summer as La Niña had failed to settle in. Though the ’24 hurricane season was impactful, it was not as active as predicted because of the weaker ENSO signal. La Niña didn’t “peak” until DJF — when it was supposed peak in OND — and didn’t have enough gusto to even get the designation (no blue outline). Therefore, we technically stayed neutral.
Going back to the IRI predictions… it looks like we’re going to bounce a bit above and below the zero anomaly line. There’s a few members going into weak La Niña or El Niño but most stay in neutral. Therefore we shouldn’t be seeing any overarching influences from the equatorial Pacific.
I look forward to catching up with everyone during the warm season!