Recent showers and storms appear to have brought a reprieve from drought conditions in North Texas.
The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Association’s (NOAA) drought monitor indicates that drought conditions have completely receded from the Dallas-Fort Worth metroplex and almost completely from the North Texas region. Weather experts attribute this change in part to the ongoing El Niño weather pattern bringing higher-than-normal precipitation.
El Niño weather patterns are characterized by warm water being pushed toward the west coast of the Americas along with weakened trade winds. The warmer waters then cause the Pacific jet stream to shift from its neutral position to the south, bringing dryer conditions to the northern half of America and Canada and wet conditions to the southern states, according to the NOAA.
El Niño weather events and their opposite, La Niña events, recur every two to seven years, according to the International Research Institute.
Meteorologists say that this weather pattern along with recent rain across the area has allowed drought conditions to recede into the south. Juan Hernandez, a meteorologist with the NWS in Fort Worth told The Dallas Express that the only drought in the North Texas area is now in the Texas hill country.
Estimates reveal that DFW received an average of 3.55 inches of rain for December of last year and 3.2 inches for January of this year.
Areas of long-term drought south of the area have remained, however. Hernandez explained that the state’s drought patterns tend to “ebb and flow.”
“It’s something that comes and goes. We usually have really bad droughts that will last for a couple of years and then as we go into a wet pattern, then slowly we start to chip away at that,” said Hernandez.
Weather experts believe that this pattern will begin to weaken and that the El Niño-Southern Oscillation (ENSO) will go back to its neutral state this spring with its effects lasting through April.
“Some state-of-the-art dynamical climate models suggest a transition to ENSO-neutral as soon as March-May 2024. The forecast team, however, delays this timing and strongly favors a transition to ENSO-neutral in April-June 2024,” reads NOAA’s website. “There are also increasing odds of La Niña in the seasons following a shift to ENSO-neutral.”
