Credit:NOAA
If it happens, as ‘temperature anomalies are continuing to increase’, it will no doubt be used by some as a peg to hang ‘human-caused warming’ on, despite being a long-established natural occurrence. Politicising the weather is routine nowadays.
– – –
El Niño conditions have developed, as the atmospheric response to the warmer-than-average tropical Pacific sea surface kicked in over the past month, says NOAA.
We expect El Niño to continue into the winter, and the odds of it becoming a strong event at its peak are pretty good, at 56%.
Chances of at least a moderate event are about 84%.
El Niño—the warm phase of the El Niño-La Niña climate pattern—changes global atmospheric circulation in known ways, giving us an idea of potential upcoming weather and climate patterns.
A stronger El Niño means global temperature, rain, and other patterns are more likely to reflect the expected El Niño impacts [Talkshop comment – waffle].
I’ll get into some of the details of those impacts later in this post.
The circus is in town
El Niño conditions are present when we have met all the criteria of our decision tree.
The monthly Niño-3.4 index, which tracks the temperature of the surface of the tropical Pacific ocean, was 0.5 °Celsius (0.9 ˚Fahrenheit) above the long-term average (long-term = 1991–2020), according to the OISSTv2.1 monthly dataset. 0.5 °C is the threshold for El Niño, so… check!
The warm-up following our recent La Niña has been pretty remarkable. We even clocked in a 0.8°C value over the past week in the same dataset, so temperature anomalies are continuing to increase.
Continued here.
Tallbloke's Talkshop 
Graph showing the average temperature over the past year of the top 300 m (~1000 ft) of the Pacific Ocean, 180-100°W departure from the long-term (1991–2020) average. Graph by climate.gov from CPC data.
From the NOAA ENSO blog:
In fact, the May 2023 average subsurface temperature was the fourth-warmest May value in our record (1979–2023). This definitely isn’t a 100% certain indicator that a strong El Niño will develop, but it is suggestive. The top two May values were 1997 and 2015, both of which preceded strong El Niño events, but the third, 1980, did not.
[…] June 2023 ENSO update: El Niño is here, says NOAA […]
Reblogged this on Climate Collections.
I said this at http://www.warwickhughes.com/blog/?p=7135
cementafriend
June 4, 2023 at 10:23 pm
SOI for May -16.2 which is into the El Nino area indicating a dry period. May rainfall 109.8mm compared to 130 year average of 154.2mm. However, 3.5 mm yesterday and some rain tonight which is a good start for June (130yr average 109.1mm)