There’s a very high probability that El Niño will continue through the fall and early winter, and it could become a strong event.
El Niño is the 800-pound gorilla for the winter climate in the U.S., but in summer, it's more like a 6-pound Chihuahua.
Forecasters estimate the chance that El Niño will continue through the end of 2015 at greater than 80%. What's behind this confident forecast?
Why is it so difficult to make a good ENSO prediction during the Northern Hemisphere spring?
ENSO is a complicated thing to model. What are the challenges, and how can we overcome them?
El Nino conditions strengthened in March. Where do forecasters think we're going from here?
Guest blogger Mike McPhaden describes what it was like making El Niño forecasts in the mid-1970s, compared with making them today.
You're not the only one wondering if we will see El Niño grow or continue into this coming winter 2015. How useful are March winds and subsurface temperatures across the tropical Pacific Ocean in predicting winter El Niño or La Niña states?
Mike Halpert from the Climate Prediction Center grades the winter forecast. Temperature outlooks fared quite well, but precipitation forecasts were not that great. The mediocre precipitation scores were partly because forecasts were counting on tropical atmospheric responses to El Niño, which didn’t emerge until late in the season.
Guest blogger Dennis Hartmann makes the case that warm waters in the western tropical Pacific—part of the North Pacific Mode climate pattern—are behind the weird U.S. winter weather of the past two seasons.