Meteorologists agree, especially amid a changing climate, that there's no clear answer to this question and a number of scenarios could unfold, ranging from a dry to a wet winter. 

"When people mention La Niña, the first word that should come to mind is variability," said Michael Anderson, the state climatologist with the California Department of Water Resources.

La Niña, the cousin of El Niño, is a natural ocean-atmospheric phenomenon marked by cooling of equatorial waters in the eastern and central Pacific Ocean. The same conditions developed last year, and the prediction center said it's not unusual to have two consecutive La Niña winters; this is called a "double-dip." This La Niña is expected to last through early spring 2022.

While meteorologists in the past associated the atmospheric conditions with a drier than normal winter in Southern and Central California, and wetter conditions in far Northern California and the Pacific Northwest, more recent trends suggest this happens only sometimes. Weak La Niña conditions were present in the 2016-2017 winter in which California saw well above average precipitation regionwide, while during a weak La Niña in 2017-2018, there was below normal rain and snowfall. 

"We’re seeing a lot of things that haven't happened a lot in history," Anderson said. "As we get into a warming world, these different influences are having a greater influence than they had had. The old patterns that used to be associated with La Niña are getting modulated, they’re getting tweaked by these processes that are stronger."

Anderson noted that some of the factors also impacting weather include the Madden-Julian oscillation, which sends ripples of energy out across the atmosphere and can either help storms form or dampen them out. He said the increasing temperatures in the polar regions and the warming of the Arctic Ocean are also at play, impacting the jet stream that steers weather systems and transfers heat and moisture around the globe.

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