A rare mid-season El Niño is gaining strength

[pscot]

It's starting out like the one in 1997, which was the strongest of the 20th century.

The robust El Niño event anticipated for more than a year is finally coming to fruition, according to the latest observations and forecasts. NOAA's latest monthly analysis, issued on Thursday morning, continues the El Niño Advisory already in effect and calls for a 90% chance of El Niño conditions persisting through the summer, with a greater-than-80% chance they will continue through the end of 2015. These are the highest probabilities yet for the current event, and a sign of increased forecaster confidence--despite the fact that we're in northern spring, the very time when El Niño outlooks are most uncertain.



SSTs have warmed for the last several months, and more recently, trade winds have weakened. As of Monday, the weekly-averaged SSTs over the four regions monitored for El Niño were all at least 1.0°C above average (see Figure 2, right). If the values for all four regions can sustain this feat throughout the next month, it'll be the first time this has happened since November 1997, during the strongest El Niño event of the 20th century. Just as significant, the persistently warmer-than-normal SSTs over the western tropical Pacific have now cooled, which helps support the reversal of trade winds so critical to El Niño.

http://www.wunderground.com/blog/JeffMasters/comment.html?entrynum=2989

[JayhawkSD]

1. He kind of oversates the case.

He says, for instance that, "This week's Niño3.4 SST anomaly of +1.0°C is at the threshold of a moderate-strength event. Another 0.5°C would push the event into the strong range, which was last observed in late 2009..." That conflates a present fact with pure speculation, because there is no assurance whatever that "[a]nother 0.5°C" is going to happen. He also hyperventilates about the "strong range" having been last seen in 2009-2010, but it should be pointed out that California's drought remained in full force during those years, which tends to debunk that said "strong range" produced much in the way of any effective El Nino weather pattern.

Yes, an El Nino pattern is beginning to show up, but lets save the cheerleading for the rainy season when something actually happens, if it does. In any case, I have a bit of a suspicion that global climate change is tossing all of the historical patterns out the window anyway.