Scanning the snow reports of New England ski areas right now is, quite frankly, depressing. Even juggernaut resorts such as Killington, with staggeringly impressive snowmaking capabilities, are barely 10 percent open. With the holiday season arriving imminently, it’s imperative that resorts get a snow base and expand the open terrain. Day after day, however, the reality continues to be above-freezing temperatures. Yet for once, the cause isn’t traceable to the specter of climate change.

“This year is a strong, very strong El Nińo. In fact it’s right at record levels.”

It’s all to do with El Nińo. Sure, you’ve probably heard of the amusingly named weather pattern, but how exactly is it affecting New England’s ski season? After all, the genesis of El Nińo occurs in the middle of the Pacific Ocean. To explain this, I reached out to Eric Fisher, the chief meteorologist for CBS Boston (WBZ). He was extremely helpful, if somewhat apprehensive about breaking the bad news.

“I think the meteorologist is probably public enemy number one at a lot of ski areas right now,” Fisher joked. “They’ve got all our pictures in a lineup in the lodge, ‘do not allow them in.'”

And the picture he painted was indeed a bleak one. At least for the short term.

“This December is not going to be a good start, which is probably not a big surprise to anybody who’s been watching the weather,” Fisher explained. It turns out that this is right on schedule for the weather system.

“So usually with an El Nińo year, you’re going to get the warmest air up front. The biggest impact is in December and that’s definitely what we’ve seen,” Fisher said. “It’s very similar to 1982-1983 where we had a lot of warm air all across the northern states. And usually throughout the winter, temperatures run above average all across the northern tier of the United States. So that’s not great news.”

Still, Fisher maintained that this isn’t ruinous for New England’s ski industry:

The better news is usually as we head deeper into the winter and towards January, February and March in particular, the impact of El Nino starts to tail off a little bit. We start to get a little closer to average and our higher chances of snow start to move in there. So while the Christmas break ski trips are probably not all that fantastic, in fact there will probably be no snow at all except for man-made snow up there, as you look towards President’s Day and beyond, those days are probably going to be much better off compared to what we’re seeing at this point.

Historically, this is true. As Curbed Ski’s Michael Schrantz pointed out in August, the El Nińo winter of 97-98 still provided Sugarloaf in Maine with 254 inches of snow across the entire winter (146 percent the normal total). And, continuing on the Killington theme, the Vermont resort had a perfectly normal 97-98 winter.

Still, this year’s El Nińo has had such a noticeable effect, which isn’t always the case for the Pacific weather phenomenon.

“Usually it’s not just whether or not El Nińo is here, but how strong it is,” Fisher said. “So we go back and forth with the phases of ENSO (El Nino Southern Oscillation) all the time. Every couple of years, we go between sometimes weak El Nińos, strong El Nińos, sometimes strong La Nińas, weak La Nińas. And sometimes it’s just ENSO neutral. We just jokingly call that ‘La Nada,’ because nothing is really going on.”

Fisher sees the winter of 2015-2016 as not being a run-of-the-mill El Nińo.

“This year is a strong, very strong El Nińo. In fact it’s right at record levels. Right up there with the strongest we’ve ever been able to record. And that doesn’t happen terribly often. Usually every one to two decades we get to a really strong one. We have this year. We have 97-98 and we have 82-83. Those are the big three.”

Even as the snow totals suffer in the short term, Fisher pointed that there is still a silver lining for New England skiers.

“The way I kind of phrase it to all the snow-lovers in the East is that you’re giving a great gift this holiday season to the people who really need it,” he joked.

“This pattern is a complete 180 from the last several years. We have had all of the cold and the snow here in the east and they have had drought and unbelievably warmth. So El Nińo should deliver a lot more cold and snow to the west. We’ve already seen that happening so far and that should keep on going for Christmas week. So if you wanted to support your western ski areas in the first half of December and then hopefully support your eastern ski areas later on in the winter, that would be the best play.”

In regards to climate change, the always-topical issues is actually not the main factor at work in this particular case. Or, as Fisher explained, it’s at the very least mostly not the main factor:

I think mostly what we’re seeing is El Nińo-driven. There might be a sliver that’s involved in there that could have to do with climate change and the fact that the world is warming up over time. Maybe that allows it to get a little bit more mild than we would typically see. The records that we’re looking at here in Boston…they were set 60 to as much as 125 years ago. So we did see temperatures similar to this a century ago. It can happen. Maybe we’ll see two more days this December of above-50 degrees and maybe that small sliver does have to do with climate change. It’s tough to figure out exactly how much more it’s adding.

As for Boston, the presence of El Nińo is actually a welcomed respite from the “snowpocalypse” of last winter. Following the record-setting season, Fisher is optimistic that Boston plows, the MBTA and the local snow-shoveling Yeti will be spared.

“I do think we’ll start to pick up more snow as we head later into the winter, but now a part of the reason why we saw so much snow last season was because it was so cold,” said Fisher. “That just does not happen when you have a strong El Nińo. We don’t get persistent harsh cold here in the Northeast. I don’t think we’re going to see totals anywhere near what we got last year.”

Bonus: Because we were all thinking about it, here’s Chris Farley, aka THE NIŃO:

Featured image via Okino, CC By SA 3.0