“Super El Niño” Could Impact Montana Weather, But…

Forecasters are warning there's more wind in the forecast for Montana this week, although it doesn't look like it will be the damaging winds we experienced again last week.

NWS forecasters in Great Falls say gusty winds could return to the Electric City region Tuesday night into Wednesday, with gusts of close to 50 miles per hour. Wind gusts through Central Montana should remain under 40, with up to 60 miles per hour gusts along the Front.

Back to March temperatures

Temperatures will remain mild for much of the week, after most of Montana's cities set new high temperature records Friday, eclipsing records that dated not only back to the warm spring of 1997, but in some cases to 1910, the year of "The Big Burn".

Billings was a little short of the forecast high, but still made 83 degrees. It was another 81-degree day in Miles City and 79 in Bozeman. Missoula, Livingston, Helena, Great Falls, Glasgow, Dillon, and Butte all had some of their earliest 70-degree temperatures ever.

Thousands of acres have already burned in Montana

It looks like a brush with wildfire season is calming down, with only one new active fire on the state maps as of Sunday night, the Roman Fire, which burned a few acres west of Missoula. But Montana DNRC was showing no new fires after a rash of smaller blazes broke out in the high winds late last week.

     🔥 There were 26 fires started last week, and already DNRC reports over 10-thousand acres have burned this year.

Next Up… "Super" El Niño?

The big question on all the scientists' minds now is whether last week's "heat dome" across the West is a sign of a long, dry summer, with some climatologists now focused on what they're calling a "Super El Niño", a turbocharged version of the Pacific currents, which usually means drier and warmer weather.

There's already a 62% chance of a regular El Niño for this summer, likely lasting into the fall. But some of the computer models are suggesting a "super" El Niño could develop by the end of this year, setting up dry, warm conditions that could prevail into next year.

That would require a rise of 2 degrees Celsius in ocean temperatures, something that last happened 10 years ago. Other years with "super" El Niños included '82-'83, and 1997-'98, as noted by those record air temperatures that were just topped last week.

The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration expects this El Niño to kick in as early as June, with a "1 in 3" chance it could amplify.