CA's Third Year Of La Niña? Here's What To Expect This Fall

CALIFORNIA — Another year, another slew of months in which Californians were forced to endure sweltering heat, extreme drought conditions and the threat of rolling power outages. Now, meteorologists are confident that the conditions residents have seen all year are here to stay a while longer.

There's a 91 percent chance that California will need to prepare for La Niña conditions through November, the National Weather Service's Climate Prediction Center said Thursday.

In short — residents are in for another hot and dry fall.

"Another dry winter is certainly not going to be good news for California," Mike Halpert, deputy director of the Climate Prediction Center told the Los Angeles Times.

If meteorologist predictions come true, it would be the third year that La Niña conditions have lingered. It would be only the third time the weather phase has stuck around for three years since record-keeping began in the early 1950s.

And it isn't just the Golden State that's expected to feel the effects of La Niña. Every state in the country is expected to feel hotter temperatures to varying degrees.

La Niña is a cooler weather phase, different from its El Niño counterpart. Together El Nino, La Nina and the neutral condition are called ENSO, which stands for El Nino Southern Oscillation, and they have one of the largest natural effects on climate, at times augmenting and other times dampening the big effects of human-caused climate change from the burning of coal, oil and gas, scientists have said.

"It is exceptional to have three consecutive years with a La Nina event. Its cooling influence is temporarily slowing the rise in global temperatures, but it will not halt or reverse the long-term warming trend," the World Meteorological Organization's Secretary-General Petteri Taalas said.

On the West Coast, La Niña is expected to bring a dry season, which could spell trouble in drought-ravaged California despite September's tropical storm, which brought torrential downpours to some parts of the state.

La Niña is also expected to limit the likelihood of atmospheric rivers — storm systems from which California gets heavy rainfall.

Lingering La Niña conditions will likely mean less rain for the Golden State this fall and drier weather overall.

According to the U.S. Drought Monitor, most of the state is under severe drought conditions, with a cluster of central counties experiencing exceptional drought conditions, the worst level of the ranking system. Dozens of other counties running through inland central California were under extreme drought.

"We get asked a lot, when you’re in a drought and we’re predicting dry conditions, what do you do?" Halpert told the Times. "There’s not a whole lot. There’s water restrictions— and basically the old mantra of ‘hope for the best but prepare for the worst.'"

Over the past two years, dry heat has contributed to multiple devastating wildfires that erupted in September and October.

According to the NWS Seasonal Temperature Outlook, much of central and Southern California is expected to face temperatures 40 to 50 percent above average. Northern California counties past the Bay Area are expected to experience 33 to 40 percent above average temperatures.

"We’ve got significant, significant drought in the Southwest and California and their normal rainy season is the winter," Halpert told The Hill. "Here in the Washington, D.C. area, it generally rains all year round. So if we have a couple of dry months, it’s OK because we can make it up another time. When you’re in California and the Southwest, 90 percent of the rain falls in that fairly short winter and spring season. So if you miss that, you’re not going to make that up when you get into the summertime."

In Southern California, a September heat wave and subsequent thunderstorms had devastating impacts. Residents across much of the Southland were asked to reduce power for several consecutive days as officials announced strain on the power grid.

Meanwhile, thousands of homes in the San Bernardino Mountains were damaged by mudslides. On Friday, a missing woman was found dead, buried beneath several feet of mud and debris in Forest Falls.

READ MORE: Missing CA Woman Found Dead After Storm, Mudslides

Across the state, Bay Area hospitals tended to swaths of people for heat-related illnesses during the September heat wave. Some forecasters have called the event the worst hot spell ever seen in Northern California.

Temperatures soared up into the triple digits across the region. Health officials said the heat wave highlighted the need to study the effect of extreme heat on public health.

READ MORE: CA Governor Signs Sweeping Climate Legislation