Racing Toward El Niño

The last couple of months has certainly brought about a rapid warming of the tropical Pacific waters, terminating the two year la nina event (yes the nina was interrupted for a bit last summer, but quickly returned). Now the focus is on what looks to be an oncoming el nino as we haed through this warm season and into next fall / winter. Of course nothing is a lock in weather, but given how rapidly the warming has occurred, and the time of year, it seems the move toward el nino will be tough to fight off, and a high end weak to moderate event is possible. Looking just statistically, if we reach the critical +0.5 above normal threshold in nino region 3.4 by June or even July, a moderate nino is the most likely, and even strong nino becomes more likely than weak. So from a probability standpoint, moderate has highest odds, then strong, folowed by weak, and lastly neutral. Again, this is only looking at the stats, not subsurface, PDO, or anything else. The state of the PDO, while it will rise in the next few months, in my view should help fight off attempts for any "strong" event, though something like 1972 cannot be ruled out. Looking at the subsurface, we appear to at least as warm or warmer than any of the devloping moderate ninos at this stage of the year, at least the ones in which we have data for. Thus, a moderate nino would appear to be the most likely call right now.

This of course would mean a less active hurricane season in terms of numbers than we have seen in most of the last 10-15 years if correct, but where the storms go is still the important factor anyway. There is always too much made of the number of storms, though to be fair, it is tough to predict who will see the most impacts from landfalls in a seasonal forecast, regardless of what anyone will tell you.

Anyway, in looking at the Spring pattern, we see a lot of things are very typical of a year in which we are seeing a developing nino. I know some have felt the nina ruled the roost for much of Spring, or that we haven't seen a lot of true nino effects yet, but the following two maps to me say otherwise. The first map shows the upper air anomalies for this Spring (Mar-May, as far as I plotted last week), and the second one is a composite of all Springs when we were heading toward a nino from a nina or neutral state. I think a lot of the major anomaly centers match up well, but you can be the judge.