Revenge Of La Niña

The forecasts last fall of severe southwestern wintertime drought resulting from La Niña fortunately did not come to pass in California, but the forecasts came very, very true in northern portions of Mexico, southern New Mexico, Texas, Oklahoma, Louisiana, and much of the South.

If you plot out the drought-hit areas, it's in a form of a very-coherent stripe running from southwest to northeast: from over the Pacific west of Mexico all the way to the Atlantic Seaboard. It is a testament to how good climate forecasting is getting that "The Stripe" was clearly-evident in forecasts way back last September. "The Stripe" is a hallmark feature of El Niño and La Niña's impacts on the United States. Sometimes it's a wet Stripe and sometimes it's a dry Stripe, but its footprint always seems to look the same. The only real question is exactly where "The Stripe" falls: California was included in the early forecasts, but in reality "The Stripe" actually fell a little farther east.

Interestingly, a flipped-over northwest-to-southeast Stripe is a feature of Australian weather too. Right now, no matter how awash the rest of Australia is in water, it won't rain in Perth, on western coast, because, like western Texas, Perth lies in a dry Stripe:

A forest service official says wildfire conditions in much of Texas are comparable to those of March 2006 when a week of blazes killed a dozen people and thousands of livestock in the Panhandle.

...No one has died in wildfires that have burned about 1,400 square miles of land in Texas this year. But weekend blazes in West Texas destroyed more than 60 homes in two communities, and crews are trying to contain fires elsewhere in the state.