Is El Niño Back? Climate Scientists Forecast Its Arrival

The odds are in El Niño's favor. The U.S. Climate Prediction Center forecasts a greater than 50 percent chance that the climate-disrupting phenomenon could be upon us as early as this summer, with a two-in-three chance we'll be welcoming it by winter. Fingers are crossed in drought-ridden California, where a strong El Niño could increase rain and snowfall. El Niño is a wild card: Even though it can be forecast months in advance, what it means for local weather can be hard to predict. Throw in climate change and things get wilder still. Some research indicates that the climate pattern could become more frequent and more intense as the ocean heats up, but this is still up for debate. El Niño also may exacerbate the ongoing effects of climate change. "If climate change is causing an area to get wetter," says L'Heureux, "El Niño can intensify that." Some meteorologists are speculating that, given the high subsurface temperatures, this El Niño could match the one in 1997-98, which killed an estimated 23,000 people and caused more than $33 billion in damages. However, it's too early to predict the strength of this year's El Niño, says L'Heureux. Spring forecasts tend to be the least reliable: They can home in on the likelihood that El Niño will occur, but not on how intense it will be. "This is actually a fairly bullish forecast considering that we're still in spring," she says.
http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2014/04/140412-el-nino-weather-forecast-science-climate-change-la-nina/