[5] Aussies Say El Niño Is Officially Over

The Australian Bureau of Meteorology announced Feb. 21 that the current El Niño is over, and that all the main El Niño-Southern Oscillation indicators "show that neutral conditions have returned to the Pacific Basin."

The Bureau said sea-surface temperatures along the Equator are cooling rapidly, "and have been below their El Niño thresholds for about a month now." Computer models also show more cooling is expected in the Pacific, "with a La Niña not out of the question." There is a better than 20-percent chance that a La Niña would develop, bringing more rain to the country, the Bureau said.

The latest weekly update from NOAA also said subsurface conditions in the ocean were favorable to creating a La Niña.

Earlier this month, the agency said the equatorial upper-ocean heat content peaked in late November, "and has been decreasing rapidly since that time, with the latest values being negative for the first time since early April 2006."

NOAA said the trends in surface and subsurface ocean temperatures indicated that the warm episode was weakening, but some areas could still expect El Niño-related effects over the next month, mainly in the central tropical Pacific.

Ocean temperatures off the coasts of Washington and Oregon were mainly average in January, with colder-than-average areas off the Columbia River and the mid-Oregon Coast. -B. R.

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