We could say adios to La Niña by spring. Here's what it means for a parched Texas. (2024)

If you want to get a taste of what a La Niña winter in Austin is like, just go outside on Wednesday. You can tell by the spring-like weather and the bone-dry creek beds in the city's greenbelts.

Not only did Tuesday's temperatures under clear blue skies soar to 82 degrees, according to the National Weather Service, we also can expect Austin's overcast morning on Wednesday to surrender to sunshine as temperatures approach 77, which is more than 15 degrees warmer than normal.

Thanks to La Niña, Austin last year came up about 10 inches short of its normal annual rainfall, making 2022 the city's fifth-driest year so far this century. Even though we're in the third-straight La Niña winter this year, hope for more much-needed rain lies on the horizon, according to forecasters. Here's what we know:

What is La Niña again?

Meteorologists will tell you that La Niña and its counterpart,El Niño, aren't storms or events that affect a specific area at a specific time. Instead, think of them as a much broader weather phenomenon. These are the basics: In La Niña, stronger than normal winds in the Pacific Ocean can lead to coolertropical waters, which then affectatmospheric circulation around the world.

Why is knowing about La Niña important to us?

During La Niña, the cooler-than-normalocean can keep the jet stream away from Texas. As a result, the river of air keeps polar air corralled and unable to encounter tropical air from the Gulf of Mexico. We typically depend on that confrontation of cold and warm air to produce rain for Central Texas.

The combination of these factors can affect weather in Texas. While El Niño can mean wetter, cooler seasons for us, La Niña at this time of year typically leaves Texas drier and warmer than normal — as we saw in 2022, which was bookended by La Niña winters.

Previously:Why a strong La Niña this fall could mean bad news for Austin and Texas drought

So is La Niña ever going away?

Yes, and possibly soon. A forecast issued last week from the weather service's sister agency, the the Climate Prediction Center, said we can expect the influence of La Niña to wane as it becomes more neutral in the spring months, starting as early as February. The center puts the chances of such a spring transition at 82%.

Drought data released last Thursday from the U.S. Drought Monitor, a joint effort of the National Drought Mitigation Center, the U.S. Agriculture Department and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, indicate that drought conditions across Texas have increased slightly, with about 73.2% of the state experiencing drought — an increase of 1 percentage point from the previous week.

What does this mean for Texas?

That's good news to Mark Wentzel, a hydrologist at the Texas Water Development Board, who provided a video update on La Niña last week. The board is the state agency responsible for water supply and flood planning, financing and research.

"As we transition to neither warmer or cooler than average, that would be the neutral conditions on the La Niña/El Niño cycle," he said. "In those neutral conditions, we expect just more average in terms of the types of temperatures that we get and the precipitation that we get."

But even average rainfall in April, May and June is good for Texas, Wentzel said.

"Those are our wet months, the ones that typically give us a lot of precipitation," he said. "We need that precipitation going into the summer."

What's the best-case scenario?

Wentzel said a possible shift to El Niño conditions later in the year means a chance for more moisture and rainfall in Texas, adding that “the months of April, May, and June historically bring a lot of rainfall to our state. And they're very important for us in terms of avoiding drought."

"If we can get some normal to above-normal rainfall during those months, that can help us stay out of drought during the coming summer months,” Wentzel said.

Ultimately, he said, "if we get to the point where we have El Niño conditions, then in the winter for Texas, that would mean above-average precipitation and cooler conditions."

Do we still have to conserve water?

"We are not out of the woods here yet by any means," Wentzel said. "We are still tracking statewide about 10 percentage points lower than normal for our water supply reservoirs at this time."

Locally, Austin relies on multiple bellwethers to gauge water scarcity, but two major indexes — the water elevation at Lake Travis and the J-17 index well in Bexar County — have been consistently well below normal for months:

• Lake Travis was considered to be at only 46% of capacity,Lower Colorado River Authority data show. The waterelevation at Mansfield Dam, which forms the lake, wasabout639.5 feet above mean sea level, which is about 28 feet below the historical average for January.
• Readings from the J-17 well in the Edwards Aquifer, an underground layer of porous, water-bearing rock sitting beneath Central Texas, show a 10-day average reading of 636.4 feet, which is 32.7 feet lower than the historical January average,according to the National Weather Service.

"So, in your local areas, you may be experiencing conditions even worse than that 10-percentage-point reduction that's, kind of, average across the state. So, do be conscious of that," Wentzel said. "Be working on your water conservation, listen to your local water providers and your local authorities about how restrictive you should be in your conservation measures. We look forward to getting out of this, but we're not quite out of it yet."