Zimbabwe's Above-Average Rainfall Likely To Diminish As La Niña Fades
The World Meteorological Organisation (WMO) says that the weak La Niña weather pattern that started in December 2024 is expected to end soon.
La Niña typically brings above-average rainfall to Zimbabwe and neighbouring countries. However, the WMO report states that this extra rainfall is likely to decrease in the next few weeks.
According to the WMO’s latest update on March 6, 2025, there is a 60% chance that the weather conditions will return to neutral, not favouring either El Niño or La Niña, during the March to May 2025 period. This probability increases to 70% for the April to June 2025 timeframe. It added:
Meanwhile, the probability of El Niño developing is negligible during the forecast period (March to June). However, uncertainty in the long-lead forecasts is higher than usual due to the boreal spring predictability barrier, a well-known challenge in long-term forecasts of El Nino and La Niña.
WMO Secretary-General Celeste Saulo said that seasonal forecasts for El Niño and La Niña, along with their global impacts on weather and climate patterns, are essential tools for informing early warnings and actions.
These forecasts are part of a broad range of services provided by the WMO community to assist in decision-making.
She explained that such forecasts have led to millions of dollars in economic savings for key sectors like agriculture, energy, and transport, and have saved thousands of lives by facilitating disaster risk preparedness.
La Niña refers to the significant cooling of ocean surface temperatures in the central and eastern equatorial Pacific Ocean, along with changes in tropical atmospheric circulation, such as wind, pressure, and rainfall patterns. La Niña generally causes climate impacts opposite to those of El Niño, particularly in tropical regions.
However, the effects of climate events like La Niña and El Niño are now happening within the broader context of human-induced climate change, which is raising global temperatures, intensifying extreme weather events, and altering seasonal rainfall and temperature patterns.
As a result, January 2025 was recorded as the warmest January ever, even with weak La Niña conditions since December 2024, when sea surface temperature anomalies in the equatorial Pacific reached the La Niña threshold.
While the El Niño-Southern Oscillation (ENSO) is a major driver of global climate patterns, it is not the only factor influencing the Earth’s climate.
With above-normal sea surface temperatures expected to persist across most major oceans—except for the near-equatorial eastern Pacific—the latest Global Seasonal Climate Updates (GSCU) predict above-average temperatures for nearly all land areas worldwide.
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