Experts bet on ‘La Nina’ for relief
By JOHN MILLER
Associated Press
Sunday, October 28, 2007 3:07 AM PDT
BOISE — After eight years of nearly constant drought, weather experts in Idaho are betting on a little girl to turn things around. ‘‘La Nina’’ is the Spanish name for the climate pattern in which unusually cold surface sea temperatures dominate the equatorial Pacific Ocean, sending storms this way.
This year, La Nina is finally beating back her brother, El Nino, the warm Pacific Ocean weather pattern that sank Idaho back into drought this past winter following a one-year respite in 2006. That year, El Nino briefly went into hiding, scientists said.
With La Nina’s return for the first time since 1999, federal weather watchers predict the Pacific Northwest, including Washington, Oregon, Idaho and parts of Montana, will experience colder, wetter weather than normal.
‘‘The odds are tilted that way — if you were going to Las Vegas to bet on it,’’ Jay Breidenbach, a National Weather Service hydrologist in Boise said. ‘‘That usually results in above-normal snowpack in Idaho. It doesn’t always work out that way, but that’s what the climate prediction center is showing.’’
Idaho, like many of the 36 states now beset by impending water shortages because of a combination of rising temperatures, drought and population growth, could use the help. About a quarter of its $45.9 billion economy comes from agriculture and tourism, so farmers and resort officials across the state follow weather with keen interest.
Still, there’s also a flip side: As La Nina brings wetter, colder weather to the Northwest, the Southeast Climate Consortium warns the weather system could result in drier, warmer weather for Florida, Alabama and Georgia.
In Idaho, La Nina may already be making herself felt, Breidenbach said.
Since the latest 12-month period for precipitation measurements began Oct. 1, every one of Idaho’s 19 river basins stretching from the Canadian border in the north to Utah and Nevada in the southeast has gotten above-average rain or snowfall, according to Natural Resources Conservation Service records.
Last year’s numbers were dismal: For the water year ended Sept. 30, a single river basin — above Oakley, in Idaho’s deep south — received more precipitation than average.
The Little Wood Basin near Sun Valley had just 70 percent of average.
Isolated pockets were even worse, as the city of Idaho Falls got just 44 percent of its average 12-inch rainfall.
In July, Boise’s average high temperature of 98.6 degrees Fahrenheit was more than 9 degrees above average, making the month the warmest on record in Idaho’s capital city.
The consequences were severe: Two million acres of Idaho burned in wildfires in 2007, the most of any state — even after last week’s California conflagrations, according to the National Interagency Fire Center in Boise. Utilities like the Idaho Power Co. set electricity usage records as residents flipped on their air conditioners, driving up power costs.
And the Idaho Department of Water Resources declared drought emergencies for some two dozen Idaho counties and cities.
As Sherrie Hebert, the National Weather Service hydrologist in Pocatello, surveys the parched eastern Idaho and southwestern Montana landscape where she grew up, she said it’s clear the drought is changing the scenery.
Hebert remembers what once were merely tiny islands in the reservoirs. They now appear to be growing larger as the water around them recedes, she said. And stands of sagebrush are creeping ever farther down the naked slashes of reservoir banks that once were covered by water, at least for part of the year.
It’s been so dry for so long, newcomers likely don’t know anything else, she said.
‘‘It’s starting to seem ordinary to me,’’ Hebert said.
