Andy Tullis / The Bulletin file photoBend snowboarder Peter Butsch slashes a powder line along the edge of the lower cornice as the wind whips his spray up during a run down the Cirque Bowl from the summit of Mount Bachelor in 2014.

As skiers and snowboarders look to the upcoming winter season with the eternal optimism they display each fall, that optimism has been significantly mitigated by terms such as “Bruce Lee” and “Godzilla.”

Those are names being used by some meteorologists to describe the strong El Niño weather pattern that is currently affecting the western United States and that is predicted to continue through the winter.

Here in the Northwest, an El Niño typically brings above-average temperatures and below-average precipitation. Translation: not much snow.

“The El Niño is big, it’s here,” says Kathie Dello, the deputy director of Oregon Climate Service at Oregon State University in Corvallis. “And there’s also the blob.”

As if snowriders needed another monsterlike word to ruin their dreams of powder. But with Halloween just three days away, perhaps these terms are allowing for some trendy costume themes.

Here’s one: A Godzilla on skis trying to turn down a snowless slope of rocks and dirt.

The “blob” is what wrecked last winter for skiers and snowboarders — and it might pale in comparison to Bruce Lee, or Godzilla, or (insert fierce nickname here).

An area of warm water off the Washington and Oregon coasts, the blob is what has sparked abnormally high temperatures over the past year, according to Dello. But the El Niño, she adds, is much bigger than the blob. The El Niño is driven by warm water across the entire North Pacific Ocean.

While the weather pattern makes the Northwest warmer and drier, California and the Southwest tend to be cooler and wetter during an El Niño.

“This El Niño is MUCH bigger than the one we were talking about last year that never came into play,” Dello explains. “And we don’t have too many strong events to compare it to. In some ways that’s good news. But we don’t necessarily know how it will play out. However, we do see a stronger signal in temperature … warmer-than-normal temperatures in El Niño winters.”

If there is any good news for snow sports enthusiasts in the long-term winter forecast, it is that the most recent forecast from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration noted an equal chance of below normal, above normal, or normal precipitation for Oregon.

“And that’s just because where the line between wet and dry sets up on the West Coast … it’s somewhere in Oregon,” Dello says.

But higher temperatures are likely, meaning less precipitation falling as snow.

“With those warm temperatures it could look a lot like last winter, where our precipitation was near normal, but it just wasn’t falling as snow, except for at the very highest elevations,” Dello says. “We have to think about our mountains and the elevation. Lower elevation is the part we’re most concerned about, that 4,000- to 5,000-foot band, where we didn’t see the snow last year. But we certainly got snow above 6,000 feet.”

It is hard to imagine a winter much worse for skiing and snowboarding than the last one. Mt. Bachelor ski area, whose base elevation is 6,300 feet, received just 212 inches of snowfall during the 2014-15 season, the lowest on record in the last 10 years. The mountain averages 462 inches of snowfall each winter. Bachelor closed on May 10 this year, the earliest the resort has closed since 1976-77, according to records kept by the ski area.

Hoodoo Ski Area near Sisters, with a base elevation of 4,668 feet, opened Dec. 31 and stayed open for the first two weekends in 2015 only to close Jan. 12 because of a skimpy amount of snow. On April 20, Hoodoo announced it was closing for the season.

Willamette Pass, located southwest of Bend off state Highway 58, opened in early January but soon closed. By the start of March, the ski area had a message on its website saying it was done for the season.

“It’s pretty hard to get worse than last year (for snowfall), but it could be just as bad,” Dello laments. “We could see another snow drought, and our drought is expected to persist through the winter. We need snow. We’ll take rain — we need snow.”

Dello and other climatologists are already comparing the current El Niño to those of 1997-98 and 1982-83, the strongest El Niños on record.

The last El Niño was 2009-10. The winters of 2010-11 and 2011-12 brought La Niñas to the Northwest; La Niñas have the inverse effect of El Niños and make for above-average snowfall in the mountains. In winter 2010-11, Mt. Bachelor set a record with 665 inches of snowfall, more than 55 feet. In 2011-12, the mountain was pounded with 528 inches of snow.

But the trend since then has been for much warmer and drier winters with meager snowfall. Dello, also the associate director of the Oregon Climate Change Research Institute, says the trend is due to global warming. She adds that Oregon is on pace for its warmest year in recorded history.

“Our winters are warming, with or without El Niño,” she says. “Even our La Niñas are getting warmer. We are seeing this warming trend. That’s not to say there won’t be big snow years in the future, but we are really stacking the deck with more of these low snowpack years, mostly because of temperature.”

— Reporter: 541-383-0318, mmorical@bendbulletin.com