Now that we are past the spring predictability barrier, I am starting to get calls asking about the likelihood of El Niño returning to the eastern Pacific Ocean over the next few months. Cliff Mass of the University of Washington posted his take on it in his blog this week at https://cliffmass.blogspot.com/2017/06/el-nino-next-winter.html. According to Cliff, there is an almost even chance of neutral or El Niño conditions for later this year, based on forecasts from May. However, the latest ENSO forecast from IRI shows that as of early June, neutral conditions are now considered the most likely. The IRI site does caution that “there can be several reasons for differences. One possible reason is that the human forecasters, using their experience and judgment, may disagree to some degree with the models, which may have known biases. Another reason is related to the fact that the models are not run at the same time that the forecasters make their assessment, so that the starting ENSO conditions may be slightly different between the two times.” They go on to discuss other differences due to the timing of access to different climate models.
The bottom line is that we feel fairly certain that we will not have a La Niña anytime soon, but it is still too early to say if conditions will continue to be neutral or swing to El Niño in the coming months.
