MétéoMédia editorial team
Published on January 12, 2024 at 9:26 p.m.
The winter of 2023-2024 has been special so far, especially compared to other seasons marked by the El Niño phenomenon.
Quebec has been through a turbulent period since the beginning of the week. As many as three storms are expected to hit La Belle Province in a week, bringing significant amounts of snow.
This particularly active period is followed by 25 days without snowfall – quite a striking contrast. “There was such a long period of drought in 2010. In fact, there have been two long periods of storms this year,” explains meteorologist Réjean Ouimet, pointing out that the winter of 2010 was a season marked by El Niño.
Good to know : El Niño is a warm water anomaly in the Pacific Ocean that impacts the atmosphere. The location and intensity of the anomaly determine the direction of the high-altitude winds and the configuration of the atmosphere. This creates a mountain ridge in the west, followed by a hollow further to the east that determines the course of the winter.
Since 1942, Montreal has experienced 20 storms occurring within a few days of each other (between two and five days). Of these, three years were characterized by strong successive systems: 1956, 1971 (the year of the “storm of the century”, March 4, 1971) and 2000. “None of these years was interrupted by El Niño. On the contrary, the opposite phenomenon, La Niña, prevailed,” emphasizes Réjean Ouimet.
This winter season is therefore somewhat unusual compared to other El Niño winters, especially in terms of broadsides.
There have been eight El Niño seasons since 1998. Of this number, only two had the number of broadsides exceed the average for the entire area: 2015 (31 broadsides) and 2019 (32 broadsides). In both cases, El Niño was weak in intensity.