La Niņa is charaterized by usually cold water in the Pacific Ocean. This is the opposite of what an El Niņo produces since an El Niņo usually results from usually warm water in the Pacific Ocean. (If you do not yet fully understand an El Niņo, please go back and read those sections.)

La Niņa means "the little girl" and is sometimes called El Viejo (old man).  It used to be called anti-El Niņo by the scientific community, but once realized that this translates to "anti-Christ", this name was quickly changed.

La Nina features cold waters in the Pacific Ocean. If we look at this graph, we can see that during an El Niņo, there is a lot of warm water, represented by shades of red.  But, during a La Niņa, these red-shaded areas become very rare and more blue starts to move in.

El Niņo and La Niņa are opposite phases of the El Niņo-Southern Oscillation (ENSO) cycle, with La Niņa sometimes referred to as the cold phase of ENSO and El Niņo as the warm phase of ENSO.

There was a rapid cooling of sea surface temperatures in sections of the equatorial Pacific during May as El Niņo conditions rapidly dissipated.  The cooling trend is likely to continue with the development of La Niņa conditions during the next three to six months. La Niņa will be impacting weather patterns around the globe this fall and into next winter.

El Niņo and La Niņa events vary in strength. For example, the La Niņa in 1987 was a stronger than the La Niņa in 1995.

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La Niņa will certainly bring us a different winter next year than we observed in 1998. There will be a tendency for more variability in our daily and monthly weather patterns because the jet stream is expected to be situated over the central United Sates rather than over northern Mexico and the northern Gulf of Mexico as observed during last winter.

Nationally, the spring of 1998 (March - May) was the 47th wettest and the 24th warmest spring on record since detailed records began in 1895, according to the preliminary data from NOAA.

The wettest spring on record, according to NOAA, occurred in 1973 with a national average precipitation of 10.14 inches. The driest spring on record, with a national average precipitation of 5.32 inches, occurred in 1925.