NORTH AMERICA - Yes, there is still a debate over El Niño, but the gap is continuing to close.
The National Weather Service Climate Prediction Center has reported that it is now 95 percent likely that El Niño will last through the Northern Hemisphere's coming winter, weakening as it progresses through Spring 2016. This is up five percent from the center’s positivity last month, when it said the chances were 90 percent.
As for the weather pattern itself, climatologists say that it is already here and is the strongest ever seen.
"The atmospheric response to the equatorial sea-surface temperature anomalies, measured by their atmospheric ENSO index (AEI), is the strongest event since at least 1948," Dr. Todd Crawford, Chief Meteorologist at the professional division of The Weather Company, said in a Sept-Nov seasonal outlook, according to the Weather Channel.
But while weather experts’ confidence in regards to El Niño builds, the amount of help it will bring during an equally record-setting drought along the West Coast continues to remain up in the air.
“Current El Niño conditions cannot tell us how many storms may cross California this coming winter or how much rain and snow will fall in our state,” State Climatologist Michael Anderson said in a prepared statement, according to the Sacramento Bee. “Strong El Niño events in the past have led to wetter-than-average conditions in the southern part of the state but offered mixed results for California’s main water supply regions in the north. This uncertainty means that Californians should continue to use water carefully and sparingly in the face of the ongoing extreme drought.”
As we previously reported, El Niño is a warming of a certain patch of the central Pacific that changes weather patterns worldwide, associated with flooding in some areas and droughts in others. This is the first since 2010, and has been progressively building.
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