El Niño /La Niña


 

We conducted an analysis of the all the snow fall events to determine if there was a signal due to El Niño/La Niña.
 

  •  We used Trenberth's article "The Definition of El Niño" (Bull. AMS 1997) for listing of the time periods for El Niño/La Niña events.
  •  We used the seasonal averages of snowfall and categorized then as El Niño, La Niña, or "typical" seasons.

    •  

     
     
     
        GSO RDU CLT
    El Niño Mean 11.1" 7.77" 7.34"
      SD 7.74" 5.51" 5.66"
    La Niña Mean 7.96" 6.63" 4.97"
      SD 4.78" 5.13" 4.55"
    Overall Mean 9.50" 7.43" 6.15"
      SD 7.51" 5.51" 5.63"

    We then used the "student's T" test and calculated the significance of the El Niño/La Niña on North Carolina snowfall.
    The small differences between the mean snowfalls combined with large standard deviations suggest El Niño and La Niña have little significance to seasonal snowfall totals.


                   Back to index .    On to Blizzard 2000 .

                   Page last updated 5/10/00.