El Niño – You Make The Forecasts For The 2015/16 Season

[Coss]

Final – The 2014/15 El Niño – Part 22 – January 2015 Update – You Make the Forecasts for the 2015/16 Season

 

This is the final post in The 2014/15 El Niño series. It began back in April 2014 when many people were expecting a strong El Niño due to the magnitude of the downwelling (warm) Kelvin wave. But the development of the El Niño floundered because it was missing something very important: additional westerly wind bursts to help push additional warm water from the west to the east along the equatorial Pacific. As a result, there was a general warming of the tropical Pacific in 2014, comparable to a moderate El Niño, as the warm water from the downwelling Kelvin wave rose to the surface. But the warming didn’t initially occur in the east-central portion (NINO3.4 region) of the equatorial Pacific. It wasn’t until the secondary downwelling (warm) Kelvin waves reached the eastern equatorial Pacific later in 2014 that the surface of the NINO3.4 region warmed to El Niño conditions…and continued to stay there.

 

Something else happened that might be considered unusual. A pocket of warm water from the initial Kelvin wave was diverted from the Pacific equatorial undercurrent (Cromwell Current) to the south, just east of the dateline. That pocket of warm water migrated west and then fed back to the equator, where it supplied additional warm water for secondary Kelvin waves in 2014.

 

El Niño conditions may or may not have existed for much of 2014, depending on the metric used to define an El Niño:

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More at the Link

 

I reckon this goes to show how imprecise forecasts can be, and how Al Gore et al are just riding the "Tax 'em if you can" wagon