Planting Season 2024: Weakening El Niño could encourage moisture
Early indications are that a weakening El Niño could encourage the return of above-average moisture across the agriculture belt this spring. It remains to be seen how this will impact planting and if any widespread delays could occur, but recent data suggests moisture will not be hard to come by.
As the beat of winters drum goes on in North America, meteorologists have already begun turning their attention to the forecast for spring. One of the hallmarks of this upcoming spring will be the gradual weakening of the El Niño, which only fully developed about a year ago. El Niño refers to the warmer than normal ocean waters in the equatorial pacific, a periodic index known as ENSO where conditions oscillate between warmer than normal (El Niño) and colder than normal (La Niña).
Periodicity usually runs around 1 – 1.5 years, but recently the tropical pacific has been out of sorts. Most memorably, a La Niña event lasted nearly three years from 2020-2023 before finally giving way to an El Niño around this time last year. It decided not to stick around long, and now most data suggests that La Niña will be back in control by the summer of 2024.
CANSIPS model showing the rapid development of La Niña this summer
Recent observations suggest that a pool of warmer water below the surface of the equatorial Pacific, previously built up during the El Niño event, has begun to rapidly dissipate. This typically occurs as El Niño events are getting ready to weaken and can further encourage the development of La Niña as upwelling occurs and cooler waters begin to take over.
With knowledge of how this year has behaved so far, plus data strongly suggesting El Niño will weaken into spring, we can create a list of analog years – essentially, years in the past that are similar to 2024 so far. This list can help us gain confidence on how the forecast may evolve moving forward into spring. The one key feature appearing on the average of the analog years? Moisture, and quite a bit of it, during the 2024 Planting Season.
Analog years showing above normal moisture
Analog years showing an active pattern
As you can see on the analog map above, the most notable moisture is centered over the Plains states. Still, the pattern is quite active with a trough in the Western US sending storm systems eastward and resulting in active weather conditions. As a whole, precipitation averages slightly less further east in the Ohio Valley and Great Lakes.
Exactly how this pattern plays out across the agriculture belt remains to be seen. At the moment, we’re confident that there will be plenty of moisture into the 2024 Planting Season. In other words, drought will not yet be an issue – although we do expect it to return by summer. There is a distinct possibility that the 2024 Planting Season could provide an illusion that moisture will be abundant throughout the summer, and we don’t expect that to be the case.
Planting delays or operational impacts are more difficult to pin down at this range. Still, when there is an abundance of moisture there typically are some areas that see more moisture than others and can quickly fall behind on planting as a result. We’ll be closely monitoring trends as we get closer in an attempt to gain confidence in what areas might be at most risk for anomalous rainfall.
If you are looking for more information or would like to work with our team, we’re currently running a 30% discount on all agriculture products through 2024. You can try a demo of our products and chat with our team to find out more. We look forward to hearing from you!
