OK so is it safe to say that "something is happening" ?!
Richard Dixon
@norcrosscricket.bsky.social Doubt you'll be reading on comms but nothing much upwind for the time being, assuming more showers don't break out.... FAMOUS LAST WORDS
A powerful El Niño Event is expected to develop during 2026.
How powerful? Well the seasonal forecasting models are currently all over the place.
So, somewhere between a Top 10 event in modern history and super-bonkers extreme crazy land. 🤔
🧪🌊
Richard Dixon
Robert Rohde
I appear to have started a weird hand-wringing competition purely by flagging up how the ENSO 3.4 region has warmed in the last few days or so.
This champ disabled replies & posts so I'm here to say that no, no it's not "everything we warned you about for decades", it's a graph of SSTs in the Nino 3.4 region that shows that temperatures are a bit higher that usual ahead of a further warmer.
I'm all for sensible discussion, not melodrama.
This for me is the Big Hurdle for AI forecasts: predicting extremes in warming world when they're not necessarily trained with them. Promising...
Now that we've reached early June, Autumn has kicked in and the leaves are starting to turn, I'm pining for those high summer days of late May when it was 20c warmer.
Open question - should everyone use the same ENSO index to save all the ONI / RONI juggling? If more are using RONI now, is ONI kept on for historic (hyperbolic!) purposes or do the two together serve a purpose?
I've just been interviewed by The Athletic about working from The Oval. I hope I've not incriminated myself...
OK so here's some explanation given that chart below blew up for no reason. Here's the same data with 4 strongest El Nino years for Aug-Oct: 1982, 1987, 1997, 2015. It's interesting that we might have a 0.5c head start on these years as the SSTs potentially warm. End of story.
