Earlier this month, smoke from wildfires throughout the Northeast drifted to the Champlain Valley. And in New York City, there was just .01 inches of rainfall recorded in October — the city’s driest month on record.
The drought that has plagued much of the Northeast this fall is expected to continue through the winter, according to NOAA’s Climate Prediction Center. The region is expected to see more frequent droughts because of human-caused climate change.
That’s true, even though forecasts show an equal chance of above or below normal precipitation levels this winter, and a Thanksgiving storm brought over a foot of snow to parts of Vermont.
“Because we are so far in deficit — some places are about 8 inches below where they should be for precipitation — so that will take several events to get back to normal conditions,” said Jessica Spaccio, a climatologist at the Northeast Regional Climate Center at Cornell University.
“A couple storms won’t erase all the drought everywhere,” she added.
But drought conditions could turn quickly, said Peter Banacos, the science operations officer at the National Weather Service Burlington office.
“The northeastern U.S. is one of the most reliable rainfall climatologies in the entire world,” he said. “So even though we're seeing abnormally dry conditions right now, it can certainly change.”
Over the next few weeks, a dip in the jet stream is expected to bring colder-than-normal temperatures to much of the eastern U.S. Still, the winter has a 40 to 50% chance of above-average temperatures across the Northeast compared to the last 30 years, according to NOAA’s Climate Prediction Center.
“It's all done in probabilities, because we can't be certain,” Banacos said.
“Obviously weather is very dynamic, and so you're still going to get low pressure systems, but it's saying that it's probably going to be a little bit more persistently an area of high pressure along the East Coast,” he added.
That’s in line with a La Niña climate pattern, which refers to sea surface temperatures in the Pacific that affects weather across the world and changes the path of the jet stream over North America.
“This La Niña is not expected to be very strong,” Spaccio said. “So we may see other factors that override the La Niña.”
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