Forecasters at Aquarium of the Pacific: EL Niño may be out, La Niña may be in

It may be good-bye for El Niño and hello to La Niña.

The once-predicted “Godzilla” storm of El Niño has thus far turned out to be a little lizard in terms of Southern California rainfall, but weather experts on Thursday offered some encouragement to those pining for more wet stuff.

“We’re about in the sixth or seventh inning,” said Mark Jackson, a meteorologist in charge with NOAA’s National Weather Service in Oxnard, perhaps likening the weather to a low-scoring game where El Niño still has a chance to score some runs.

Jackson spoke to reporters at Aquarium of the Pacific, in the Ocean Science Center and next to the Aquarium’s NOAA “Science on a Sphere” rotating globe, which shows real-time ocean phenomena.

NOAA says El Niño, touted by meteorologists as the strongest on record along with the 1997-98 event, may already have peaked, but that doesn’t mean it hasn’t had an impact, or won’t douse Southern California in the next couple of months.

Jackson said El Niño has hit Central and Northern California hard this year, which is good, because Southern California depends on so much water from up north. The Sierra snowpack is at about 94 percent of normal for this time of year, according to the California Department of Water Resources. Jackson said reservoirs are filling back up.

“This has made some impact on the drought conditions,” he said.

El Niño remains strong, with continued warmth in the surface waters of the east-central tropical Pacific, but most indicators show the weather pattern weakening and becoming neutral by late spring or early summer, and maybe shifting to La Niña in the fall, according to NOAA.

La Niña is characterized by unusually cold ocean temperatures in the eastern equatorial Pacific, and tends to do just the opposite of El Niño in the United States, bringing wetter-than-average conditions across the Pacific Northwest and drier and warmer-than-typical conditions across the southern tier.

Jackson said with only a handful of El Niños on record in the last 65 years, forecasters are learning about the weather pattern as much as they are making predictions about its impact.

“This has not quite behaved as we expected it to,” he said.

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Forecasters at Aquarium of the Pacific: EL Niño may be out, La Niña may be in