From 9News.com (Maya Rodriquez):
“The thing to remember is that El Nino is not over,” said Josh Willis, a climate scientist with NASA’s Jet Propulsion Lab…
“NASA studies these phenomena from space and we have this really amazing satellite called the ‘Jason’ missions, which tell us how tall the ocean is,” Willis said. “And a lot of the signal, in terms of the El Nino, is really captured by watching heat move around in the ocean – and that’s what these satellites measure with exceptional accuracy.”
The warming of the Pacific waters began last year and this El Nino is considered among the stronger ones, like an El Nino measured in 1997 and 1998. Scientists are puzzled, though. Unlike the one in the late 90s, the current El Nino has not brought a lot of the added moisture it was expected to bring to parts of the West.
“This year’s has peaked so late in the year, we’re still waiting for a lot of those rains,” Willis said…
“Not everything is El Nino. We do have to remember there are weather patterns in the Arctic [that] push cold air out of the Arctic and bring warm air up from the tropics,” Willis said. “This El Nino is fading right now, as we speak, but it’s still there and it’s still kicking.”
Forecasters said, though, don’t count El Nino out just yet.
“As we head into March and April, it does look like the odds favor significantly more precipitation both of those months and potentially another heavy snowfall,” David Barjenbruch with the National Weather Service in Boulder told 9NEWS.
NASA says the current El Nino will stick around through April and possibly even May. What happens after that isn’t clear, but they offered up two potential scenarios. It could change into a La Nina, which is a cooling of waters in the western Pacific or we could see another El Nino emerge. They have seen back to back El Ninos before, so there is precedent for that.