Will this year's El Niño impact fire season in Oregon? Not so fast

Added: 2026-05-09

[00:00:00]And this week, Governor Tina Cotch encouraged Oregonians to prepare and plan for what's expected to be a severe wildfire season. The state fire marshall's office showed off some of its wildfire related equipment, including a mobile command center there. Experts point to low snowpack, expanding drought, and a future weather pattern in the Pacific. We also have a potentially strong El Nino in the weather forecast, increasing the likelihood for warmer and drier conditions.

[00:00:31]>> Okay, meteorologist Matt Safino is here now. Matt, help explain to us >> El Nino and help us understand how it could affect the the fire season.

[00:00:38]>> So, it may not affect the fire season.

[00:00:41]The correlation between El Nino and the summer weather patterns is really not that strong. It's quite robust for winter weather patterns. And I'll explain all this right now. As a matter of fact, first of all, what is El Nino?

[00:00:52]El Nino is a change in the water temperatures of the equatorial Pacific Ocean. And that matters for global weather patterns a lot because it changes where heat and energy and moisture get thrown on up into the atmosphere from the ocean. So, normally you have east winds coming off the coast of South America, the trade winds, and it's relatively cool water here for its latitude. But during an El Nino, that changes. The winds reverse. we end up getting a lot of warm water in the eastern and tropical Pacific Ocean.

[00:01:22]That's El Nino defined and that has a big impact on North American weather in the wintertime. This is the typical the classic winter pattern uh for North America, the United States. Very wet we expect across the southern tier of the United States. And we do tend to be warm and dry in the winter when we get an El Nino year. And right now we're seeing the tropical ocean really heat up here across the equatorial Pacific. And we expect this to be a strong and potentially very strong El Nino as we go into fall and winter. So here's another look at that. I just showed you this.

[00:01:54]The warm pattern across the southern tier of the United States bringing a lot of moisture in with the subtropical jetream. We in turn tend to be on the dry side during the winter pattern. So what about summer? Well, here's a look at a map, and I'll zoom in on this so you can see how often our summers have been drier than average or wetter than average during El Nino years. If we zoom in on this, you see a little bit of warming in the Northwest, but not that much. And quite a cool signal across the central US there. That's temperatures.

[00:02:24]What about precipitation? Again, this is for the summer months, June, July, and August. Same situation. You see a little bit of warming across Washington and a lot of cooling across the rest of the country. So could actually have the effect of having an even cooler summer across the United States. But these are for all the years, 29 summers dating back that long. So what I did is I looked at four years that we call analog years. Those are the years that we expect to most closely match the upcoming year. And I looked at years where we were coming out of a moderate to strong Linia like we just did and heading into a strong or very strong El Nino. And for that there were four really good years. 1957,72 82 in 1997. And when you look at that, it's like, wow, look at this. This is the long-term average. The temperatures, cooler than average colors across the entire West Coast and much of the United States have had cooler than average summers during those four years that are similar to the summer setup that we're going into this year. So, that's temperatures. What about precipitation?

[00:03:24]Same thing. You don't see any real dry areas unless you get down into Texas and Florida. And specifically for Oregon and Washington, we had wetter than average summers. So, you never know how this is going to play out. We just came out of a linino where we expect to get above average mountain snow. We certainly did not. And one thing that I have to certainly mention is that the game is changing a bit. Our our typical analog years, the ones that we used to compare to, may not hold up as well as they used to because of climate change. This is a graph showing the heat content in the ocean. And look at this. From December and January onward, we have so much heat stored in the tropical Pacific Ocean, well the entire Pacific Ocean right now that that's a gamecher as well. So the analogs and the methods that we have been have been using over the last 20 30 years to compare El Nino and climate may not be holding up as well as they used to and that could have an impact on our summer weather as well, Blair. So there's a lot that goes into this. We definitely know that El Nino has an impact on winter weather. Historically, the connections between El N El Nino's and summer weather haven't really been all that strong. So, we'll have to wait and see how it plays out and hope for the best, of course. In the meantime, I've got a 7-day forecast that is warmer than average for you, but it's not it's not too warm. It's not record high temperatures. We'll see 73 tomorrow, morning clouds and afternoon sun. And then on Friday, we had some sprinkles in the forecast. Took them out. It's going to be dry. The weekend looks fantastic.

[00:04:47]Great Mother's Day. How about that?

[00:04:48]>> I know. It does look like a beautiful Mother's Day.

[00:04:50]>> Going to be a good one.

[00:04:51]>> Thanks so much, Matt. I always learn something from your forecast.

[00:04:53]>> You are welcome.