What Does La Nina Really Mean For Canadian Skiers?

A few weeks ago, we shared an update from NOAA, stating that conditions in the North Pacific no longer favoured a La Nina winter. Naturally, there was much wailing and gnashing of teeth. After all, every skier worth their salt knows that La Nina is the bringer of all things cold and snowy to western Canada, right? I wondered, though, is that true? Does La Nina automatically mean a good snow year? Does El Nino automatically mean a bad one? What does a neutral year mean for snow totals? So, like any good snow geek with too much time on his hands, I went looking for answers.


This is what we want. Golden, BC - Winter 2016. Photo: Matt Ruta, Skier: Kaitlin Paris

I found snowfall data for the past nine to thirteen years from Red Mountain, Whistler and Revelstoke Mountain Resort. I had hoped to find some data from a Rockies resort as well, but wasn’t able to. Then I compiled this information into a nerdy chart and used it to rank each season by something I’m calling Year Score.

Year Score is a metric I created by calculating each resort’s total snowfall for a given year as a percentage of their maximum snowfall within the sample period, then averaging across the three resorts. In theory, this should give an idea of the best and worst years within the sample period based on how well all three resorts did, rather than just one. This is the number I used to decide whether a year was good, bad or simply average, and to what degree.

Obviously the sample size here is very small. The correlations generated by this little research project are fairly anecdotal and should not under any circumstances be confused with real science. That said, based on the limited data I have taken the liberty of drawing some very basic conclusions to my original questions.

First: while a La Nina year is a strong indicator of a good snow year (the two highest ranked years were affected by La Nina), the 07-08 season was also affected by the phenomenon and didn’t even place in the top five, scoring worse than two El Nino years. Not only that, but since the highest ranked years (10-11 and 11-12) came back to back, some further research may be warranted to look for other climate factors which may have affected that period. The verdict: La Nina appears to be an indicator that a season will likely be above average, but is not the be all, end all some consider it to be.

What about El Nino though? Much the opposite of its sister, El Nino brings with it a warning of terrible winters. Two resorts saw their worst winters under El Nino conditions, in 09-10 for Revy and Red. By year score, the worst winter overall also occurred in an El Nino year. Whistler, however saw its worst winter in neutral 14-15, bringing some doubt to the equation. Further muddying the waters is the revelation that a strong El Nino winter last season cracked our top five. Perhaps El Nino isn’t quite the villain we thought…

Now for our wildcard - the neutral season. Unless you’re a Whistlerite, you don’t need to worry about this guy completely spoiling your party. In fact, along with La Nina, neutral years were the most frequent contributor to the top five, providing both the third and fourth ranked winters. Perhaps none of this is as clear cut as folks like to think. It looks like - to the annoyance of everyone looking for a great snow guarantee - the only way to find out will be to wait and see.

All the data is below. Generating some of this required counting above ten, which is admittedly not my strong suit. If you find errors, or something exciting that I missed, speak up!

* Best in column

x Worst in column

Nd: No data

Ref:

http://www.revelstokemountainresort.com/conditions/historical-snowfall

http://ggweather.com/enso/oni.htm

https://www.whistler.com/weather/history/

http://www.redresort.com/mountain/snowfall-history/