TIME Magazine Says We'll have An El Niño Next Year

Or at least they heard someone say so:

There is a 75% chance an El Niño event will occur in 2014, according to an early warning report published in PNAS (Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences) Monday.  The report uses a research method that projects the occurrence of the weather system a full year out—versus the six month maximum typically predicted by other methods.

Hmmm..... That's interesting. What do the folks in Australia think? They are a little less-convinced:

The El Niño–Southern Oscillation (ENSO) state is neutral, with climate models suggesting neutral conditions will persist at least until the end of the austral autumn. However, some warming of the Pacific is likely in the coming months.

Most international climate models surveyed by the Bureau suggest the tropical Pacific Ocean will warm through the austral autumn and winter. Some, but not all, models indicate central Pacific Ocean temperatures may approach El Niño levels by early winter. Model outlooks that span autumn tend to have lower skill than outlooks made at other times of the year, hence long-range outlooks should be used cautiously at this point. Neither neutral nor El Niño states can be discounted for the second half of 2014.

Here's a nice article that summarizes the doubt:

However, climatologist Tim Barnett at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography in La Jolla, Calif., who did not take part in this research, said the methods the researchers employed were outdated.

"The techniques the researchers used made me feel like I was back in the 1980s and 1990s," Barnett said.

Climatologist Anthony Barnston, chief forecaster at Columbia University's International Research Institute for Climate and Society in the Palisades, N.Y., who did not participate in this study, noted that this latest research did not model the physics of the seas or atmosphere, but only looked for statistical patterns in temperature readings.

"A common problem with statistical methods is that you can always find a statistical relationship if you look hard enough," Barnston said. "Also, while they looked at data from 1950 to 2013, there is relatively lower quality temperature data from that area in the '50s and '60s. We wish it were better, but it isn't, and when you're using a statistical method and define the (statistical) relationships from not-so-great data, you lose a considerable degree of success."

"The simplistic calculations they use basically ignore all the physics we've discovered about the ocean and the atmosphere of the equatorial Pacific," Barnett added.

Barnston and Barnett noted their own forecasts also suggest an El Niño may occur later this year. "However, our forecast is based on physical models," Barnston said. "If we used their method for the next 20 years, I bet their method will begin underperforming, because it's not based on physics and is not based on enough high-quality data."