If you don’t like the weather in Indiana, wait five minutes and it will change. And it always changes from one year to the next, right? Odds favor no two seasons being alike, although the past three winters have borne notable similarities. Weather experts point toward an explanation for this winter three-peat. Yet they indicate that late spring and early summer ’23 could be far different than ’22.

“Our ability to forecast farther out is better today,” says Beth Hall, Indiana state climatologist and director of the Midwestern Regional Climate Center at Purdue University. “Weather forecasters tend to be more accurate when global weather and ocean patterns like the El Niño-La Niña cycle are involved, especially for winter forecasts.”

Weather trends

Here are observations about recent years:

Last three winters. Hall and several other professionals who deal with forecasting have a good track record over the past three winters in Indiana. In all three cases, they predicted mild weather during the first half of winter, with less snow than normal. Each time, they expected more winter-like conditions during the second half of winter. In broad terms, the past three Hoosier winters fit that mold.

One-off deviations. Before you point to the bone-chilling cold outbreak around Christmas ’22, Hall adds this caveat. “You are always going to have short stretches which deviate from the overall trend,” she says. “That’s what we saw.”

Rare and extra-rare. The past three mild winters, especially early, can be traced to the La Niña, or cool phase of the El Niño-La Niña cycle, Hall says. This cycle refers to cooling and warming of sea surface temperatures far out in the Pacific Ocean. These shifts impact atmospheric pressure, which influence air circulation patterns aloft.

“It’s rare to have three La Niñas in a row, but that’s what happened,” Hall says. “It’s even rarer for a La Niña to stick around all year, but that happened in ’22.”

Current forecast. Spring into early summer ’23 in the Midwest is likely to be on the warm and wet side, Hall says. That is what long-term climate outlooks were still showing as of April 1. That’s not an encouraging forecast for completing spring field work and early planting.

“Warm and wet is better than cool and wet,” Hall says. “If it is warm and wet, you get more evaporation and drying. It’s also a matter of degrees. We don’t know if warm and wet will wind up just slightly above normal, or if it means flooding. Forecasts can indicate trends, but not how intense the trend will be.”

End of La Niña. The three-year trend toward La Niñas is over, Hall says. Odds are even between whether the cycle will stay in neutral through summer or shift to an El Niño, or warm phase. However, it’s not expected to move back into a cool phase anytime soon.

Summer trends unknown. Hall says it’s difficult to make predictions looking into early summer, let alone beyond. However, Eric Snodgrass, a private forecaster who works with Nutrient Ag Solutions, indicated at an Illinois forum in early March that he wasn’t seeing signs of drought showing up in any major way across the Corn Belt this summer. Stay tuned!