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Michael Dunne: I’m Michael Dunne. As if this year’s weather wasn’t concerning enough, with historically low snowpack and dry conditions, experts are warning that next fall and winter could be even worse. Today on the show, you’ll hear from the state climatologist about the El Nino effect. While that weather pattern normally brings a dry winter to the Pacific Northwest, early models suggest we could be heading toward a Super El Nino, which could mean an extremely dangerous weather pattern for next year. Climate change is making our weather hotter and more intense, and that condition mixed with a Super El Nino could be historic. Later in the show, you’ll hear from one of our own reporters about a historic ship that once ferried John Steinbeck and is making a comeback on the West Coast. Larry O’Neill is an associate professor at Oregon State University and the state climatologist for Oregon. Larry, always great talking with you. Thanks so much for coming on.
Larry O’Neill: Thank you again for having me.
Dunne: Let’s start with this. What is El Nino?
O’Neill: El Nino sounds scary, but it’s basically a cycle of temperature in the Pacific Ocean along the equator. El Nino is a phase of this oscillation in which the water along the equator gets much warmer than normal. There’s a reverse phase called La Nina, when the water along the equator gets much colder than normal.
Dunne: What happens once that water warms? Talk about the impacts we tend to see.
O’Neill: Up here in Oregon, we might wonder why we care about the temperature along the equator. What happens is that during these really warm episodes, El Nino disrupts global weather patterns, including where rain falls. We get droughts in some places and flooding in others, along with changes in hurricanes and tropical cyclones across the globe. It really changes weather patterns here in the Pacific Northwest. Usually during El Nino, we end up warmer and drier than normal, particularly in the fall and winter. The other thing that happens during El Nino years is that global temperatures rise quite a bit. We’re already experiencing a really warm start to this year, and if this ends up being a very strong El Nino, we might see the record for global temperature broken.
Dunne: That’s kind of scary. I know this past winter was very dry, but El Nino wasn’t in effect. We just happened to have a dry, fairly warm winter.
O’Neill: That’s right. We were basically in neutral conditions, or a very weak La Nina. We still have cycles of random weather patterns, but El Nino and La Nina tend to push those patterns in a particular direction. It’s a rule of thumb that El Nino is warm and dry here, but that’s not the only factor. We have other weather patterns and other oscillations in our climate system. The ocean affects the weather and the weather affects the ocean, and there are times when we see the impacts of other patterns rather than El Nino. But El Nino and La Nina tend to give us the only source of predictability we have more than a few weeks out.
Dunne: Do they always alternate? Is it always La Nina, then the next year El Nino, or maybe weather isn’t that simple?
O’Neill: No, it isn’t, and that’s what makes it fun to study. I wouldn’t call these patterns completely random, but they tend to oscillate on a time scale of two to seven years or so. Typically we get an El Nino, then maybe a La Nina or neutral conditions for a couple of years, then maybe another La Nina. El Ninos tend to form in isolation from each other, so we rarely get two years in a row of El Nino. We more often get consecutive years of La Nina. We had three straight La Ninas between 2022 and 2024, but that’s not very typical.
Dunne: Many people might remember the heat dome that hit the Pacific Northwest a few years ago. Was that driven by El Nino, or was it something completely separate?
O’Neill: That one was due to a more complicated set of factors. It wasn’t an impact from El Nino. It was more of a random event.
Dunne: I’ve also read that this could be what’s called a Super El Nino. Talk about what that might mean if this turns out to be a supercharged El Nino year for us.
O’Neill: Super El Nino refers to the magnitude of the temperatures along the Pacific. It just means the water is going to be much warmer than in a typical El Nino. In fact, many forecast models are now consistently projecting this as possibly the strongest El Nino we’ve ever observed, which creates some uncertainty about what impacts we might see for Oregon. Historically, we’ve had three of these super El Ninos, or very strong El Ninos, since we started monitoring them back in the 1970s or 1980s. During two of those three, we were actually much wetter than normal here in the Northwest and had a good snowpack, which goes against the rule of thumb that El Nino is typically a warm and dry event for us. Because this is going to be a very strong El Nino, it’s possible the weather patterns will be disrupted enough that we get a rainier than normal winter. But that’s not set in stone, because we haven’t seen an event this strong before, so we’ll be learning on the fly. The stakes are really high this year because much of the western U.S. is heading into a severe drought. Oregon’s snowpack was historically low this year and the state was quite dry. At this point we’re really depending on a wet winter to restore our reservoirs, soil moisture and groundwater for next year so we don’t go into drought conditions. If that doesn’t happen, next year’s drought will be even worse than this year’s.
Dunne: That’s sobering. I’ve always heard about things like cloud seeding. If it does turn out to be as bad as we might predict, is there anything that can be done to encourage more rain?
O’Neill: The short answer is not really, not to the extent we’ll need. There’s a utility in Idaho that does some cloud seeding, and there’s been talk of doing it in Central Oregon, though I don’t think it’s being done right now. Cloud seeding might increase precipitation by something on the order of 5%, some people claim 10%, which could partially mitigate the outcomes. But in a winter when we have only 70% of normal precipitation, getting 5% or 10% more still means we’re in a bad drought, maybe not as bad, but otherwise there’s really nothing else we can do to affect the weather.
Dunne: It sounds like a typical El Nino has negative impacts on us getting the rain and snow we’d normally expect. Are there other areas of the globe that welcome El Nino because it provides benefits?
O’Neill: There are parts of the Midwest that end up getting more rain than normal, which is beneficial for growing crops. Although in some places there’s a fine line between sufficient rain and too much rain. There are definitely parts where it can be beneficial, but it’s usually a short-lived benefit and something you can’t rely on.
Dunne: Weather is fascinating to study because of its unpredictability. You said it could be a typical El Nino where we know basically what happens, and then it could be very different. What accounts for all that variability?
O’Neill: There are a lot of things that can account for it, but essentially weather systems tend to be fairly chaotic and random, especially in the mid-latitudes of the northern and southern hemispheres. We live at about 45 degrees north latitude, which is usually where the jet stream is. The jet stream can meander, and that meandering can be responsible for high and low pressure systems, meaning nice weather and stormy weather. A lot of things affect that motion, but it’s a random dynamical system that’s nearly impossible to predict. That said, there are other oscillations, like the Pacific Oscillation and the North Atlantic Oscillation, that also give us some insight into why the jet stream and the weather can be so chaotic. That’s the short answer.
Dunne: That leads to another question I’m sure you deal with a lot. Is climate change making phenomena like El Nino even more severe?
O’Neill: To an extent. The oceans are warming, and warming pretty rapidly, though not as rapidly as the atmosphere, and that warming signal is pushing things toward more El Nino-like states. But right now we don’t see firm evidence that climate change is really impacting the effects of El Nino or La Nina on the rest of our weather systems. Climate models tend to be quite inconsistent on whether El Nino or La Nina will happen more often. But one thing we do know from climate models is that precipitation extremes will happen more often, separate from El Nino and La Nina. The atmosphere is just warming overall, so El Nino and La Nina are both warmer than they used to be, and some of the impacts are starting to change in character, even though the phenomena themselves seem to be operating more or less as they did in our undisturbed climate. Going back to precipitation, we’re observing that when we get heavy rains and downpours, they tend to be heavier and more isolated, meaning more flood risk. And when we get dry periods, those periods are drier than they used to be.
Dunne: He’s Larry O’Neill, Oregon’s state climatologist and an associate professor at Oregon State University. Larry, it’s always great to talk with you. Thanks so much for coming on.
O’Neill: You’re welcome. Thank you.
Dunne: Now let’s check in with KLCC’s Brianna Bowman about a ship called the Western Flyer. Brianna Bowman is our Weekend Edition host. Brianna, thanks so much for coming in to talk with me.
Brianna Bowman: Thanks for having me.
Dunne: I know you’ve been busy all weekend, and now I’ve got you here to talk about a very interesting story you just put together. Tell me about the Western Flyer.
Bowman: I’m so excited to share this story with KLCC listeners. The Western Flyer is maybe one of the most famous fishing boats in the world. It was built in 1937 and fished in the sardine fisheries in central California. Then in 1940, John Steinbeck and his best friend Ed Ricketts, a marine ecologist, chartered the boat for a research expedition in the Sea of Cortez, also known as the Gulf of California. They spent about six weeks there collecting marine organisms, mostly invertebrates, and documenting what they saw. After the trip, Steinbeck wrote about it and co-authored a narrative with Ricketts, though Steinbeck is mostly credited with it. You can read about their journey in Steinbeck’s book, “The Log from the Sea of Cortez.” It’s just an incredible story. The Western Flyer was kind of lost to time for a few decades after that. It had a few different jobs: it was a crabber in the Bering Sea, and it was chartered by the International Pacific Halibut Commission for research into trawl bycatch in the 1960s. Then it truly faded into obscurity and was renamed the Gemini. As any seafarer knows, renaming a boat is considered bad luck.
Dunne: Oh, really?
Bowman: When it was named the Gemini, it sank twice at the dock in Anacortes and spent up to six months underwater. Then a man named John Gregg, who had read “The Log from the Sea of Cortez” as a boy, recognized the boat and knew its history and its significance to literature and marine science. He bought the boat, restored it and set up the Western Flyer Foundation. Now the boat is restored to its former glory, and it’s a gorgeous vessel.
Dunne: It’s so interesting, because most of us know Steinbeck from his novels, “Travels with Charley” and “The Grapes of Wrath.” He was kind of an amateur scientist in this regard.
Bowman: From reading his biography, either in the copy of the book I have or online, I believe he may have done part of a marine biology degree at some point. It was something that really interested him. He and Ed Ricketts were really good friends, even best friends, and it was something they both cared about.
Dunne: It’s now rechristened as the Western Flyer. What’s it doing now, and where can people see it?
Bowman: My story is about how it just concluded its visit to the Pacific Northwest. It visited Newport last month, along with Charleston and Coos Bay. It made some stops in Washington and just spent a couple of weeks in Seattle. It’s now making its way down the West Coast back to Moss Landing, California. The foundation wants the boat to visit the Pacific Northwest every other year, and in the alternating years, it will recreate the trip Ricketts and Steinbeck took to the Sea of Cortez, taking it down to the Gulf of California to recreate their expedition.
Dunne: And will actual science be conducted on the boat?
Bowman: That’s one of the really cool things about the Western Flyer. It’s currently being used as an education and outreach tool, but real scientists are also collecting oceanographic data from it. Jack Barth, an OSU professor and oceanographer, collects oceanographic data from the Western Flyer, so it’s contributing to science as well.
Dunne: What does it say that something that was at the bottom of the ocean was able to be restored? What does that say about our love of history?
Bowman: I think it’s our love of stories. This boat has such an incredible story associated with it. I’m currently reading “The Log from the Sea of Cortez,” and you get this amazing feeling, like you’re stepping into history, when you step on the boat. I got to walk around the Western Flyer when it was in Newport, and seeing the boat after reading how Steinbeck described it, it’s an amazing feeling.
Dunne: What was it like walking on the wood and planks that one of the most famous American authors once walked?
Bowman: I’m getting chills just thinking about it. The boat itself is gorgeous, a wooden boat. It was restored by the Port Townsend Shipwrights Cooperative, and the extent of detail they went to to maintain the character and accuracy of the boat is incredible. About 90% of the wheelhouse, everything above deck, is as it was back in 1940 when they went on the expedition. They had to replace quite a bit below deck, but the character of the boat is maintained down to the details of the head, or bathroom, on the boat: the original tiling, the original wood and the color of the paint. All these little things recreate exactly what it would have been like when it went down to the Sea of Cortez.
Dunne: About how long did it take to restore the boat?
Bowman: It took years for the Shipwrights Cooperative to restore it. The Western Flyer Foundation has some really great articles and photos of that restoration process on its website. I really encourage listeners to check it out.
Dunne: When you went to tour the boat, did you talk to other folks? What did they say about stepping onto literal history?
Bowman: One of my favorite conversations was with the current captain, Paul Tate, who I found out is my neighbor in Newport. I had no idea.
Dunne: Small town, right?
Bowman: Very small town. He had known about the boat his entire career. Tate has a long and storied career in fishing in Alaska, including work for the Alaska Department of Fish and Game, the Coast Guard and various research vessels. He says that now, as captain of this famous boat, he pinches himself. He can hardly believe this is what he’s doing at this stage of his life.
Dunne: Brianna Bowman is our reporter and hosts Weekend Edition for us. Brianna, thank you so much for coming in to talk about the Western Flyer.
Bowman: Of course. Thank you, Michael.
Dunne: That’s the show for today. All episodes of “Oregon on the Record” are available as a podcast at KLCC.org. Many of us use the term forage when we scan the contents of our fridge or pantry, but tomorrow’s guest is literally foraging in city parks and even roadsides for 100% of his food. I’m Michael Dunne, host of “Oregon on the Record.” Thanks for listening.
