Uncertainty lingers as La Niña likely fades in the weeks ahead
Forecasters see signs that La Niña will fade away over the weeks and months ahead
La Niña is weak but hanging on—for now, anyway.
That’s the latest from forecasters tracking the progress of conditions in the eastern Pacific Ocean, which can have far-reaching effects around the world.
We’ll likely see better-than-even chances that our ongoing La Niña will fade by the end of the spring.
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La Niña is the cold phase of the El Niño-Southern Oscillation, or ENSO. This pattern occurs when water temperatures around the equator in the eastern Pacific Ocean drop 0.5°C or more below seasonal for about seven consecutive months or longer.
The U.S. Climate Prediction Center (CPC) reported on Thursday that a very weak La Niña continues this month after arriving at the start of 2025.
Colder-than-normal Pacific waters have grown warmer over the past couple of weeks, an indication that our weak La Niña is fading.
Given current conditions in the Pacific Ocean and the atmosphere above, “weakening La Niña conditions and a trend toward ENSO-neutral” are likely over the coming weeks and months, the CPC said.
The CPC expects that we’ll see ENSO-neutral conditions by the end of the spring season, which means that neither La Niña nor its warm-water counterpart El Niño would be present across the Pacific Ocean.
If predictions of ENSO-neutral come to pass, we may not have a dominant global driver for weather patterns heading into this upcoming summer.
During the warm season, El Niño and La Niña are most impactful in terms of the Atlantic hurricane season. La Niña tends to enhance Atlantic hurricane activity by decreasing the destructive wind shear that flows over the basin.
While it’s far too early to predict this year’s potential hurricane activity, unfavourable conditions for tropical systems could have a better chance of prevailing across the Atlantic basin without La Niña in the picture.
Even as the pattern fades, we’ll likely continue to feel La Niña’s lingering effects in the atmosphere into the early summer months.
Canada’s overall weather pattern over the next week will reflect what you’d normally expect to see under La Niña’s influence, with active weather across the West Coast and portions of Eastern Canada while below-seasonal temperatures slide down the Rockies and cover the Prairies.
Forecasters see signs of a fifty-fifty chance for either continued neutral conditions or a return to La Niña by this fall—but it’s worth noting that it’s notoriously difficult to predict ENSO’s future during the spring season.