Don’t let this mostly-pleasant winter pass you by... you never know what the next one will hold.

That’s the general advice of both territorial meteorologist Mike Smith and Environment Canada forecaster Alyssa Charbonneau.

Making a long-distance prediction about next fall and winter takes some courage, especially when it’s tentatively suggesting colder weather, but that’s what both weather-heads are saying.

In an email to the Star, Smith, the local weather guru, said indications are the El Niño phenomenon that many people think is the cause of the relatively balmy weather so far could be cracking by springtime and early summer.

“Yes, forecasts right now are that the El Niño will weaken through the remainder of the winter, with “neutral conditions” (neither El Niño or La Niña) persisting this spring,” he wrote.

“Most models are showing a transition to La Niña by early fall 2024. I haven’t seen anything forecasting a La Niña as early as the spring, but late summer looks like a good possibility.”

Just how much effect that will have on the weather in the Yukon remains to be seen, but it’s worth noting the extra-snowy winters of 2020-2021 and 2021-2022 coincided with a fairly strong La Niña effect.

Smith said, “La Niña is much like El Niño for the Yukon, in that it likely has some impact on our seasonal weather but not in a way that lets us make any meaningful prediction.

“Taking a really big stretch, La Niña winters usually end up with a big snowpack somewhere in or around the Yukon, so possibly that’ll be something to watch for winter 2024-25.”

Smith said he’s fairly confident in general of what the models are showing.

“The model predictions for El Niño/La Niña are usually pretty good from a qualitative standpoint: if the prediction is that El Niño is going away and a La Niña will build, then that will probably happen.

“They’re not very good at forecasting the strength of the respective systems more than three to four months out, though, so next winter could be anything from a barely-there La Niña to a moderately strong one.”

Charbonneau told the Star, “That is the latest outlook for the El Niño oscillation, as we call it. The long-range forecast is for the La Niña forming around July or September and potentially continuing into the winter.”

“When we are talking about El Niño or La Niña for western North America; it really plays a role on our winter weather,” 
she continued.

“So that’s kind of late December until early spring. That’s where we really see an impact. So even though we’re likely to see El Niño change into neutral for the spring, that likely won’t have any impact on this winter or summer.”

El Niño tends to bring warmer-than-normal winters to the southern Yukon, while having little effect further north.

La Niña, as Smith noted, has the opposite effect in the southern regions of the territory.

“They really can play out in lots of different ways,” Charbonneau said.

She was reluctant to attribute the warm weather in October, November and December 2023 solely to the El Niño.

“It’s more likely in December onwards the El Niño has been influencing our weather. Other factors were likely responsible for the fall,” she said.

The decent weather is expected to continue in the El Niño pattern for the rest of this winter, Charbonneau added.

There are likely to be some intermittent cold snaps, as the southern Yukon has already seen through January and 
this month.

The temperature is likely to continue to be as much as three degrees Celsius above normal for the next three months.

“It doesn’t rule out periods of colder weather in there,” she said. “It’s smoothing out all of the extremes.”

She said the La Niña effects on Yukon weather are more reliable to predictions of cold rather than extra snow, disagreeing with Smith to some small degree.

If the trend toward a La Niña continues, a colder winter could definitely be in the cards for next year.

According to National Geo-graphic, El Niño is a climate pattern that describes the unusual warming of surface waters in the eastern tropical Pacific Ocean.

El Niño is the “warm phase” of a larger phenomenon called the El Niño-Southern Oscillation (ENSO).

La Niña, the “cool phase” of ENSO, is a pattern that describes the unusual cooling of the region’s surface waters.