After sloshing through the wettest dry season in 30 years, Hawaii now faces the likelihood of widespread drought well into next spring, National Weather Service forecasters said Wednesday.

Kevin Kodama, senior hydrologist, said the same strong El Nino conditions that helped bring plenty of rain in the summer and fall are likely to keep things dry this winter and spring.

Starting in December, many areas in Hawaii will experience less than 50 percent of average rainfall through the end of April, Kodama said.

More specifically, moderate drought should set in across the state, with some areas — such as South Kohala and South Point on Hawaii island, and Leeward and Upcountry Maui — facing severe or even more extreme drought by late April, he said.

This summer’s plentiful rainfall will certainly help to delay the impacts of drought, Kodama said, but degraded pastures and shrinking water catchment systems likely will start revealing themselves as early as the end of this year.

By late April, he said, the drought will have turned lots of Hawaii’s current lush landscape brown and ushered in an early start to the 2016 fire season.

The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s Climate Prediction Center is already calling this year’s El Nino the strongest since 1997-1998 and possibly the strongest in more than 50 years.

During El Nino, warm ocean water pools at the equator in the eastern Pacific and ends up changing weather patterns across the globe.

In Hawaii, El Nino means a wetter than normal dry season, less tradewinds, warm and muggy summers, and greater threat of tropical cyclones, plus winter drought.

Axel Timmermann, a University of Hawaii oceanography professor, said the National Weather Service announcement confirms what international forecasting centers have been predicting since July: that Hawaii will likely experience drier than normal conditions starting in December and lasting well into next spring.

But something weird is happening that could make El Nino last even longer here, Timmermann said.

Heat is not yet being discharged from the equator like it did, for example, in 1997, when this process started in August, he said. This year, researchers are seeing heat still building up along the equator because of a northward shift of winds.

“This is quite unusual and does not really fit into our picture on how strong El Nino events work,” Timmermann said in an email. “This means that the termination of this El Nino event could be delayed compared to a normal event. In this case, El Nino conditions may prevail into May or June of 2016.”

There’s even a chance drought may persist into the normal summer dry season because of another climate phenomenon known as the Pacific Decadal Oscillation, or PDO, according to state climatologist Pao-Shin Chu.

Chu, a UH professor of meteorology, said the Pacific is a year into a decade-long positive phase of PDO that tends to have lower rainfall totals.

Hawaii weather officials say the dryness will have followed the wettest summer in 30 years.

The weather service’s Kodama said the 2014 dry season previously was the wettest in 30 years. And this year easily beat 2014, while featuring the wettest August and September on record for many locations, with monthly totals more than double previous records.

Though Hawaii hasn’t endured a direct hit from any of the 15 tropical cyclones that have meandered across the Central Pacific this hurricane season, the islands have been drenched by cyclone-associated rain bands and moisture drawn up from the deep tropics, Kodama said.

Moreover, warmer-than-normal sea surface temperatures have provided additional moisture to fuel rainfall production, he said.

This summer’s ample rain reduced the number of wildfires in Hawaii and helped to make the islands completely drought free for the first time since April 2008, according to the National Drought Mitigation Center.

Despite the prediction for meager rainfall ahead, weather officials said people should still be prepared for storms that come our way. On Wednesday they offered these recommendations:

>> Do not drive on roads with fast-flowing water.

>> Do not walk across flooded streams.

>> Clean gutters and drainage ditches.

>> If you live in a flood-prone area, identify your evacuation routes ahead of time.

>> Stay informed of changing conditions by monitoring forecasts via the media.

“Drier than average doesn’t mean no rain,” Kodama said. “Avoid dry weather complacency.”