El niño it’s continuing to strengthen as expected.The ongoing event is already quite strong, and although much has been made of daily fluctuations in the Niño region ocean temperatures, all available evidence continues to point toward continued strengthening into the fall months and persistence through winter 2015-2016.
Interestingly, the strongest westerly wind burst yet this year has just occurred in the western tropical Pacific, which has initiated a powerful new Kelvin wave that is now propagating eastward across the Pacific basin and will continue to reinforce the strengthening event through September. It’s still too early to say exactly how El Niño will influence California’s upcoming winter, though it still appears that there’s a significantly increased chance of a wetter-than-average winter. Of shorter-term interest: extremely warm near-shore sea surface temperatures off the Mexican and California coasts will continue to present an increased potential for East Pacific tropical remnant events through September and possibly October.
“We’re predicting this El Niño could be among the strongest El Niños in the historical record,” said Mike Halpert, deputy director of the Climate Prediction Center for the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, in a teleconference with reporters. This year’s El Niño is already the second strongest for this time of year in more than 60 years of recordkeeping, he said.
Conditions in the Pacific Ocean suggest that what has formed there is as big as anything seen since 1997-1998, a system that brought the term “El Niño” into popular culture, and which is remembered for the catastrophic amounts of water it dumped on California, triggering flooding and mudslides.
