Friday March 10, 2023
AccuWeather —
NOAA’s Climate Prediction Center (CPC) on Thursday declared an end to the long-lasting La Niña that began nearly three years ago, signaling that ocean temperatures in the equatorial Pacific were warming up.
The La Niña pattern, the colder counterpart of El Niño in the El Niño-Southern Oscillation (ENSO) climate phenomenon, has influenced the weather across the Northern Hemisphere in a number of ways in recent years.
The unusually long-lasting nature of the phenomenon led to the unofficial nickname of a “triple-dip La Niña” as it persisted through three winter seasons. Conditions were first observed in the central Pacific in the three-month stretch from July through September 2020, and they continued nearly uninterrupted for 30 months. This is just shy of the La Niña from 1998 to 2001, which lasted 32 months, according to AccuWeather Senior Meteorologist Dan Pydynowski.