Return To Normal in 2016, After Strong El Niño in 2015

Not too hot, not too cold – instead, water temperatures in the equatorial Pacific Ocean should be just around normal for the rest of 2016, according to forecasts from the Global Modeling and Assimilation Office, or GMAO. With these neutral conditions, scientists with the modeling center at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center say there is unlikely to be a La Niña event in late 2016. Last winter saw an extremely strong El Niño event, in which warmer-than-normal water sloshed toward the eastern Pacific Ocean. Historically, some of the larger El Niño events are followed by a La Niña event, in which deep, colder-than-normal water surfaces in the eastern Pacific Ocean, off the coast of South America. "We are consistently predicting a more neutral state, with no La Niña or El Niño later this year," said Steven Pawson, chief of the GMAO. "Our September forecast continues to show the neutral conditions that have been predicted since the spring." The scientists with GMAO feed a range of NASA satellite data and other information into the seasonal forecast model to predict if an El Niño or La Niña event will occur in the next nine months – information on the aerosols and ozone in the atmosphere, sea ice, winds, sea surface heights and temperatures, and more. The models are run on supercomputers at the NASA Center for Climate Simulation – 9 terabytes of data each month.