It's Summer in Texas.... Again...

“If I owned Texas and Hell, I would rent Texas and live in Hell.”
--General Phil Sheridan

The Climate Prediction Center has good news and bad news for the next several months, depending on your point of view.  And there is good news to read between the lines, if you are willing to make predictions which could possibly be wrong – something climatologists have become a little gun-shy about.

The La Niña event of last year, in large measure responsible for the brutally hot and dry summer which, given that you are reading this, you presumably survived along with us at Myrtle’s place, has definitely desolved into ENSO-neutral conditions.  The odds (according to CPC) of the El Niño Southern Oscillation effect trending towards El Niño or statying ENSO-neutral are about 50-50.

Of course, we at Myrtle’s place put a lot more faith in the notion that things tend to change, and that inertia is the dominant feature of the universe – meaning in context that because we have just come out of two consecutive La Niña events, and water temperatures in the equatorial Pacific have been trending in the direction of an El Niño event, those temperatures are more likely than not to continue trending in that direction.

We could be wrong, of course, but we don’t think so.

We are more confident than the CPC, therefore, in predicting that the months of June and July will be brutal here in Texas, but that starting in August and September, that brutality should be replaced by more or less “normal” (by Texas standards) dog days.

Throughout much of the southern half of the country, and particularly here in Texas, temperatures will probably be well above average (both daytime highs and nighttime lows) for the next 8-12 weeks, and lingering effects from La Niña will keep the chances of precipitation fairly low during that time as well.  It may very well look and feel a lot like last year’s drought, frankly.

But there will be a couple of fundamental differences.

First, while the ground is still relatively dry, the fact that much of Texas has already received more rain in the first part of 2012 than it received in all of 2011 significantly reduces the chance for a repeat of last year’s self-perpetuating cycle.  The ground will not bake nearly so easily this year as it did last year, making it possible for scattered afternoon thunderstorms to develop in a pattern we remember fondly from yesteryear – and the cooling outflow from those storms mean even folk who don’t get rained on will at least get occasional relief from the heat.

Second, because La Niña has broken, the jet stream will not be so ridiculously absent from the Northern Plains during Summer 2012 as it was last year.  The infamous Butterfly Effect may be a bit too abstract for some to understand, but it should be easier to see that the lack of drought upstream from the Southern Plains makes it more likely that water will flow into the Southern Plains.  Further, on those occasions when the Jet Stream takes a slight detour southward from the Canadian border, it weakens – ever so slightly – the death grip that the summertime high pressure system which sits over the central United States exerts over our weather.

This anticyclone is the dominant feature of June-July-August forecasts, and is responsible in large measure for the fact that any storms which develop in these months are likely to be scattered and short-lived in nature.  Picture the region from Kansas south the the Gulf of Mexico as a giant crockpot (no, not “crackpot” though it is easy to see why you draw that connection); in the summertime this crockpot has a 10-ton elephant sitting on it.  That’s the summertime high pressure system.  Our pot of beans is not boiling over, no matter what.

Enter the third major difference between this year and last – if, as CPC hints, and we at Myrtle’s place firmly believe, El Niño makes an appearance starting in August of this year, that high pressure system which is usually huge (centered anywhere from Dallas to Topeka, and radiating outwards to include everything from Brownsville to Fargo) will shrink dramatically, and drift eastward.  That will mean instead of 105° August and September afternoons, we may be looking at a chilly 95° for the dog days.  Not much relief as far as a Yankee might be concerned, but danged if we Texans won’t be pulling out our long-sleeved shirts a few months early.

There will also, under this model, be increased chances for relieving rains during the August – September – October timeframe, though still not particularly high.  The real soaking rains from an El Niño don’t arrive until December and January.  So long as we get a repreive from the heat, we won’t be complaining.

Happy farming!