UK Met Office Glosea5 in its August 2018 update is depicting El Niño (fairly weak) for 2018-19 as well and specifically, El Niño Modoki.
CFSv2 has upgraded its El Niño forecast further going up to moderate to even strong levels. I think this is down to the model's warm bias. We're still in ENSO neutral at this time of writing this post with the latest SST anomalies:
ENSO 3.4 - 0.1c
ENSO 1+2 - 0.1c
During the super El Niño events of 1982-83, 1997-98 and 2015-16, we were already in El Niño threshold (0.5c or above) by March-April-May 1982, April-May-June 1997 and October-November-December 2014 respectively. The latest tri-monthly period (May-June-July) had an ENSO anomaly of 0.1c which is textbook ENSO neutral and it's getting very late for El Niño to take place especially to what the CFSv2 is depicting. ENSO can happen late like 1976-77's El Niño did not begin 'til August-September-October but you can't help but feel extremely dubious with what the CFSv2 shows.
As shown by the subsurface temperature anomaly profile below in the Equatorial Pacific, there is quite a bit of warm water waiting to be filtered up to the sea surface but recently at the end of July over towards the eastern subsurface equatorial Pacific, some cooler waters have started to appear. Will these enlarge and make El Niño near impossible to occur or will they promote the likelihood of El Niño Modoki? We'll have to wait and see.
We're awaiting on the ECM to update for August 2018 to see what it shows for ENSO this time around. Last month, it was going for a weak to moderate El Niño Modoki.
Last but not least, here's the latest sea surface temperature anomaly map from NOAA and the equatorial Pacific doesn't look particularly favourable for El Niño with a mix of cool and warm waters over the region. Quite a strange situation with these models depicting El Niño yet the signals from the Pacific itself don't look favourable for El Niño.
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