– There is a 53% chance of La Nina conditions during June-August 2022 continuing during the Northern Hemisphere summer, a U.S. government weather forecaster said on Thursday.
The La Nina weather pattern is characterized by unusually cold weather in the equatorial Pacific Ocean.
There was a “40-50% chance of La Nina or ENSO-neutral thereafter,” the National Weather Service’s Climate Prediction Center (CPC) said in its monthly forecast.
“The forecaster consensus favors a slower decay of La Nina due to the recent renewal of ocean-atmosphere coupling, which contributed to cooler near-term forecasts,” it added.
The El Nino pattern brings a warming of ocean surface temperatures in the eastern and central Pacific every few years, and is the opposite of La Nina.
(Reporting by Seher Dareen and Arpan Varghese in Bengaluru)