Goodbye El Nino! Hello La Nina! What does this mean for the Atlantic Hurricane season?

La Nina reverses the pattern established by El Nino.

Goodbye El Nino! The monster heating anomaly in the tropical Pacific has abated and experts now believe a La Nina event, the cool sister of El Nino, will come to dominate the tropical Pacific for at least the next year to come. It has implications for the United States.

LOS ANGELES, CA (California Network) - El Nino did not bring the mayhem and destruction it was forecast to deliver, despite being among the strongest such events ever recorded. However, it's little sister, La Nina, is about to try her hand at mayhem.

La Nina is the opposite of El Nino, and typically follows such events, but not always. La Nina is characterized by the cooling of waters in the tropical Pacific. Scientists have estimated there is a 75 percent chance of a La Nina event starting sometime this summer. Usually it begins to show up in July, but Australian meteorologists suspect it could come earlier this year, staring in July.

Right now, conditions in the tropical Pacific, from the trade winds to the surface temperatures, are neutral.

According to official records, 2015 and 2016 have been the hottest years on a record that stretches back more than 130 years. In addition to breaking temperature records, El Nino also delivered quenching rains to California. And while those rains were nothing like the deluge that scientists warned could happen, they were enough to allow the state to end its restrictions on water use.

Now, La Nina may come and this will bring changes. One of the most notable will be an active hurricane season in the Atlantic. The Eastern Coast has enjoyed several years without a major storm making landfall. That run of good luck is almost certain to end this year.

One effect of La Nina is a weakening of the trade winds at the surface and a strong West African monsoon. The West African monsoon provides the beginning of the Atlantic storms, but during El Nino years, strong trade winds tear apart the storms before they reach North America. In La Nina conditions, the protective winds that would destroy the storms don't blow as powerfully, which allows the storms to grow much larger. The more frequent and large the storms are, the more likely they are to make landfall and bring destruction.

In California, drought is likely to return with a vengeance. Even if fewer records for heat are broken, we're not talking about much of a difference in degrees of daily temps. The summer weather will still be very hot. Winter weather may be colder. Both seasons will be much drier. For California, this is a major disaster. Careful stewardship of the state's water supplies will be essential.

For the rest of the country, a wetter, colder winter may be coming up, especially in the Midwest and Northeast.

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