Hope it's OK to quote on ENSO

Will there or will there not be a significant El Niño event this year?  The chances of having one are high, but apparently the chances of having one that would be classified "large" are marginal.  To find out why, this discussion gets right to the heart of the current state.

An excerpt:

"Another factor the forecasters are considering is the model guidance. Most climate models are predicting a weak-to-moderate event, with dynamical models slightly favoring a moderate event and statistical models favoring a weaker event.  The ensemble mean of NCEP’s Climate Forecast System, CFSv2 (Figure 3, black dashed line) has been fairly consistent in forecasting Niño3.4 anomalies in the range of 1.0-1.5°C, but, as you can see from the individual model runs (blue, red, and gray lines), there is an envelope of possible values from 0°C to slightly above 2.0°C."

Link to the figure discussed above:  it's right here.       

For a lot of reasons, I'm pulling for this one to come on strong and stay strong.