Saturday, June 17, 2017

Dude, Where's My El Niño?

A quick note on terminology for normal people who don't obsess about this stuff:

  • ENSO = the El Niño/Southern Oscillation
  • ENSO Neutral = the ocean surface temperature anomaly in the ENSO 3.4 region is between +0.5°C and -0.5°C.
  • El Niño/La Niña conditions exist when the anomaly is greater than (Niño) or less than (Niña) the half-degree cut-off for neutral.
  • A full blown El Niño/La Niña is declared when the conditions persist for three overlapping three-month periods i.e. five consecutive months.
Here's where we were at last month:

http://iri.columbia.edu/wp-content/uploads/2017/05/figure3-2.gif

And the latest, from IRI/Columbia University, June 15:

http://iri.columbia.edu/wp-content/uploads/2017/06/figure3.gif

Here is the current range of model predictions:

http://iri.columbia.edu/wp-content/uploads/2017/06/figure4.gif