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This 'Little Boy' Just Might Hang Around for Good

By Craig Altschul
May 15, 2006

A new study - there's always a new study - sent TV weatherpersons into their customary tizzy last week by essentially suggesting that El Nino might stick around for a while. In fact, the Little Boy just might move in with us permanently.

Without putting too fine a point on it, most El Nino winters tend to be milder than normal over Western Canada and other parts of the northern United States. El Nino essentially disrupts the ocean atmosphere system in the tropical Pacific waters, causing consequences across the globe, and to the point, on our mountains.

Journal Nature presented the findings of Gabriel Vecchi, a visiting scientist at a National Oceanic and Atmospheric lab in Princeton, N.J., and his colleagues this month suggesting that global warming caused by human activity already has begun to dampen wind circulation patterns over the Pacific Ocean. The long-term effect: Potentially a permanent El Nino condition, or at least, aspects that resemble it.

There are two contrasting examples of the effect of an El Nino winter on the West Coast. If you worked at Mountain High Resort in the mountains above Los Angeles, as Paul Bauer has, an El Nino is generally quite welcome to visit. El Nino is about as welcome as the bird flu, however, if you are located in the Pacific Northwest. Effects vary across North America's mountains.

"I've been in So. California since 1982 and the pattern is fairly clear," Bauer told The Industry Report. "El Nino winters generally bring above normal precipitation from the Sierra south. It brings lots of rain with most storms ending up with snow. One or two degrees either way can make a major difference."

The contrast was obvious, Bauer notes, during the most recent El Nino winter of 2004 and 2005. The Pacific Northwest was dry as a bone and many ski areas had to close down their lifts for significant portions of that season.

"Weather is never cast in stone anyway," Bauer says. "I do believe in global warming, but you really have to understand who is doing these studies, who is paying for them, and what their motivation might be. If we listened to all the gloom and doom that came out of the scientific world over the years, we would be under 25 feet of water by now."

Forecasters at the NOAA Climate Prediction Center issued their final U.S. winter outlook for the months covering the 2004/05 ski season by predicting an enhanced likelihood of cooler-than-average temperatures in much of the East, Middle Atlantic, and South; warmer-than-average temperatures in Alaska, Hawaii, and the West; wetter-than-average conditions from New Mexico through Texas to Louisiana; and drier-than-average conditions over the Ohio Valley and the Northwest. Fairly prescient, it seems.

NOAA officials did not take the bait tossed out by The Industry Report to comment on this latest study and what it could permanently mean to mountain resorts.

Bauer says the best approach to an El Nino event - sporadic or permanent - is to be sensible and use common sense in planning.

Attendees at next week's National Ski Area's Association convention in Florida will find a discussion session centering on the issue. The session is dubbed Winter Wonderland or Winter Bummerland? How Resorts Address Adverse Weather Patterns. Perhaps this latest thinking on El Nino will keep a panel made up of Jon Mahanna, Angel Fire; Tim Prather, Wisp; and Brent Tregaskis, Bear Mountain, busy.

How about you? Are you ready to have this sometimes naughty, sometimes nice Little Boy move into your spare bedroom forever? What will a permanent El Nino mean to mountain resorts and your region or are you tired of TV meteorologists getting positively giddy over every new study?

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