Ag Weather Forum

Agencies Hedge On El Nino

Bryce Anderson
By  Bryce Anderson , Ag Meteorologist Emeritus
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The extremely-robust El Nino event in the Pacific Ocean is not looking like that big of a happening ahead of mid-June--at least that's the way both the U.S. Climate Prediction Center (CPC) and the Australia Bureau of Meteorology (BOM) are talking in latest analyses.

Here's what the CPC said last week:

"Chances that an El Nino will occur by summer are above 70 percent, hitting 80 percent by the fall. But subsurface temperature anomalies have tapered off some from earlier this spring, decreasing the odds the event will be as strong as the El Nino of 1997-98." (The '97-'98 El Nino is considered to be the standard for major El Nino occurrences--and, earlier this year, the Pacific was forecast to head into that category.)

The Australia BOM experts have actually gone a little further. An article in an Australia paper, The Weekly Times, by reporter Chris McLennan, featured these comments:

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"Weather forecasters at the Bureau of Meteorology last week dramatically downgraded the fears of El Nino’s drying influence on the weather in southern Australia this year.

While the El Nino pattern could still form in spring, the conditions that originally caused scientists to issue the warning disappeared last month.

The prediction came only days after the Bureau again said some international climate models were uncertain about El Nino’s forecast."

That's a big difference from predictions earlier this season of an El Nino that would elbow its way into the recent-history books.

The full article from The Weekly Times is at this link: http://tinyurl.com/…

The CPC discussion is here: http://tinyurl.com/…

Bryce

Twitter @BAndersonDTN

(CZ)

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