La Niña has brought mostly underwhelming Flagstaff snowfall since 2015
PHOENIX (AZFamily) —The Climate Prediction Center continues to forecast a high chance of La Niña this winter. Last month, we wrote about the science behind La Niña and what that means for Arizona precipitation over the past few winters.
We know that La Niña tends to bring drier-than-normal conditions to Arizona, but we wanted to see if the past nine years back up that trend for snowfall.
This graph of Flagstaff winter snowfall shows that, in most cases, snowfall has been below average for La Nina winters going back to 2015. The red line shows normal Flagstaff winter snowfall at 58.7 inches.
Only one of the four La Niña winters since 2015 has been above normal. That was in the winter of 2022-2023, when Flagstaff recorded 115.4 inches of snowfall!
This illustrates that, although La Niña tells us what tends to happen with winter snowfall, it does not always follow the trend. Either way, we are off to a good start with what will likely be the first snow of the season for Flagstaff this Friday into Saturday!
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