A potent El Ni\u00f1o this year could help protect the Gulf Coast from hurricanes and eventually deliver much-needed drought relief to Florida and Texas.<\/p>\n
The natural climate cycle, which is driven by warmer temperatures in the central and eastern Pacific, affects weather patterns worldwide and is known to inhibit the formation of Atlantic hurricanes and tropical storms. It also can lead to more precipitation in parts of the United States.<\/p>\n
The National Weather Service said last week that El Ni\u00f1o conditions were present<\/a>, and would strengthen through the end of the year. That\u2019s potentially good news for the Gulf Coast. Much of the region has been affected by drought, and the southern U.S. historically experiences wetter winters<\/a> when El Ni\u00f1o is around, typically every two to seven years.<\/p>\n \u201cWe can\u2019t rely on El Ni\u00f1o to bring us out of drought anytime soon, but that relief would come later in the year,\u201d said Emily Powell, Florida\u2019s assistant state climatologist. \u201cIn the near term, we\u2019ve had a pretty good start to our wet season, so hopefully that will continue to bring more consistent and beneficial rainfall.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"A potent El Ni\u00f1o this year could help protect the Gulf Coast from hurricanes and eventually deliver much-needed…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":339697,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[27,29,28],"class_list":["post-339696","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-texas","tag-texas","tag-texas-headlines","tag-texas-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/339696","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=339696"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/339696\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/339697"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=339696"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=339696"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=339696"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}