Pacific Ocean temperatures have been increasing rapidly over the last month, suggesting that a stalled El Niño, harbinger of wetter winters here, has popped the clutch and is back in gear.
The latest monthly forecast discussion concludes that El Niño, a warming of the equatorial Pacific, will keep strengthening and should last through the winter. There was some argument in the forecast community that this year's edition would be "puny". But while sea surface temperatures stopped warming back in September, buoy-based instruments continued to record warming subsurface that the National Weather Service's Erik Pytlak told us last month would likely lead to a resurgent El Niño.
There's been a lot of press coverage around the country suggesting that El Niño will end this or that drought (see here, for example) but the effect is subtle. Here in New Mexico, it's most noticeable in the southern part of the state, where El Niño tips the odds toward a wetter winter. But it's important to remember that this is no guarantee, but rather a shift in the probabilities. Here's the latest forecast map. That light green in southern NM indicates an increase in the odds of a wet winter:
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