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THANK YOU fetch for catching that. You're right. It's Westerly. Total dumbass moment. Here is a corrected version:

SOI is staying negative, but edge of the knife negative.

More importantly, West of the dateline for the last solid week and a half there have been Westerly wind anomalies. Actually, the winds themselves are Westerly in vector, not just the anomalies, which could be the big change we would need to see to put it over the edge. Eastward winds out of the warm pool towards the central Pacific move tons of convective available potential energy over towards the dateline, where convection is needed to build and reinforce SST anomalies through the beginning of Fall.

There are also now reasonably persistent OLR anomalies on and over the dateline to the East and West, indicating that this convection is starting to pop up. Weak, but they are there.

The NINO gridboxes have cooled by about a tenth of a degree in the last 7 days.

That said, I'm ambivalent about today's press releases that this will be the second strongest event (after 97/98). I don't see where the potential for this to reach 82/83 proportions comes from.

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I've been wondering why the press release back then had been mentioning this episode as a strong event, also. The only conclusion I can come up with, is that the '82/'83 event also had a slow start. It only had Nino 3.4 anomalies of +0.6 and +0.7 at this time of year in '82. Only to ramp up big later in the fall and winter.

1950-present El Nino/La Nina episodes

I guess "they" think the same ramp-up will happen this winter. But, we also had similar anomaly stretches at this time of year in '94, '02 and '04. Those were weak to moderate at best El Nino's. So, I'm puzzled as to why they think this event will blow-up this winter? Most areas of the equatorial Pacific only seem averaging +1.0 at best, with pockets of cooler and warmer mixed in. I guess they are hoping for continued west wind bursts out of the western Pacific to continue feeding the latest Kelvin wave.

The other thing I've noticed lacking in this El Nino, is the lack of wind anomalies in the southern hemisphere portion of the equatorial Pacific. It seems only the northern half has been playing along in trying to build a El Nino. That could be what's holding it back, IMO. But, then again, maybe the so. hemi. portion doesn't play as much a role this time of year?

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did you surf today?

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