El Niño and La Niña Shifts Set Tone for Jamaica Farming and Storm Outlook

Jamaica’s farming community is adjusting to weather that no longer fits the old seasonal script, as the island moves away from La Niña and edges toward more neutral conditions, with El Niño possible before the year is out.

Francine Webb, Senior Plant Health and Food Safety Officer at the Rural Agricultural Development Authority (RADA), told JIS News that what growers have seen lately does not match long-standing expectations. “What we have been experiencing over the December, January, February period [which is] our typical dry season, is a little unusual. It was a little wetter than what we would normally see,” she said.

Webb said forecasters are painting a different picture for the months ahead. “The outlook coming up to…April, May, June, from the Meteorological Service of Jamaica is indicating that it is not going to be as wet as we would anticipate this second rainy period to be,” she noted.

She linked that outlook to movement away from La Niña toward a more neutral El Niño setup, together with “warmer than usual sea surface temperatures around the Caribbean and the North Atlantic”. Webb placed local conditions inside the wider El Niño Southern Oscillation (ENSO) cycle. “The ENSO is a term that is used for the overall climate cycle…an umbrella term for the shifting in the patterns,” she explained.

Those global swings also feed into how the 2026 Atlantic hurricane season may play out after it opens on June 1. “On that scale, you would have the neutral phase in the middle. El Niño is the warmer than average waters, leading to conditions that are drier, higher temperatures and would result in it being a less intense hurricane season. The La Niña [ phenomenon ] is cooler than average water…meaning wetter conditions and more frequent and intense hurricanes,” Webb further explains.

Jamaica has been coming out of a La Niña stretch that left a clear mark on recent months. “We can attest to a number of different cold fronts. So the temperatures were cooler and we had far more rain than we would normally have,” Webb notes.

A move into neutral ENSO territory should nudge the island closer to familiar seasonal rhythms, though swings in the weather are still hard to call with confidence. “In this neutral phase…the likelihood of having predictable extremes is less. It is likely that we will phase now into an El Niño as we go into the July, August, September period. That also has bearing on the predictions for the hurricane season…to not be as intense as we have experienced in previous times,” Webb tells JIS News.

Rainfall, heat, and storm risk tied to ENSO remain central worries for agriculture as growers and other sector players plan ahead for a hurricane season that may be less fierce on paper but far from risk-free. Webb urged farmers not to let down their guard. “…we just need one major one to really cause a problem”, she stressed.