There is a 71 percent chance of La Niña affecting the climate from October to December 2025, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s (NOAA) Climate Prediction Center said in an update.
NOAA said a transition to La Niña is “likely in the next couple of months” from an El Niño-Southern Oscillation (ENSO)-neutral, the phrase of ENSO where ocean temperatures and atmospheric conditions in the tropical Pacific are at neutral temperatures and neither El Niño nor La Niña is present.
Newsweek has contacted the National Weather Service outside of regular working hours via email for comment.
Why It Matters
La Niña is part of the naturally occurring global climate pattern, ENSO, and acts as an opposite to El Niño, and both can have profound impacts on American weather and climate.
The two phrases mean “the little girl” and “the little boy” in Spanish, La Niña typically causing eastern Pacific water to become colder than usual temperatures, and El Niño causing the sea temperatures to be warmer than average.
This means that La Niña typically brings drier, colder weather, with strong winds, which can lead to drought in some regions and also a more severe hurricane season. El Niño brings heavy rainfall, with increased risk of flooding, and warmer temperatures.
What To Know
The NOAA said that sea temperatures remained near-to-below average in August 2025 across the central and eastern Pacific ocean, which indicated that currently the climate was in the ENSO-neutral phase of the weather pattern, alongside other climate-related metrics.
However, the agency said “all available models from the North American Multi-Model Ensemble favor La Niña to emerge and persist through the winter.”
Chances of La Niña decrease to 54 percent in December 2025 to February 2026, but for the autumn to winter of 2025, the climate shift is “favored” in predictions, NOAA said.
The impacts of La Niña could be significant, and would vary region to region in the U.S.
The weather pattern would likely bring warmer drier conditions to the South, particularly along the Mexican border and into Florida, while the North may see wetter than average conditions.
In Central America, outbreaks of cold temperatures could occur, while in New England, New York and the Great Lakes, wet and cold conditions could bring heavier snowfall.
Last year, a La Niña weather pattern developed in December and lasted through to the spring, meaning it could potentially be the second year in a row the climate shift occurs.
What People Are Saying
Raghu Murtugudde, a professor in the Department of Atmospheric and Ocean Science at the University of Maryland, told Newsweek: “NOAA is more gung-ho than others on this forecast. Other centers are mostly seeing neutral conditions but some cold [sea surface temperature] anomalies are in place in the eastern tropical Pacific. If the ocean-atmosphere interactions amplify this pattern then we may have a La Niña but it’s unlikely to be very strong.”
Murtugudde added: “The U.S. will have mostly warmer fall temperatures in the west and milder fall in the eastern half. Winter precipitation can be below normal as well if La Niña does emerge. But we are still recovering from the record warm temperatures of 2023 to 24 so we have to see how the traditional La Niña teleconnection patterns may be modulated by this climate change signal in background.”
What Happens Next
If the La Niña weather pattern does occur this year, it is forecast to come between October to December, with lower chances of it happening in the new year.
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