There continues to be great interest and speculation with what will happen this fall with the rapidly strengthening El Niño. The US government forecast and most every other meteorological organization forecast has the El Niño strengthening to record levels by early winter. There are a number of practical and unknown aspects to this situation that forecasting the impact on Iowa difficult. While the current forecast has rapid strengthening, it is also forecast to rapidly decrease, which can lessen impacts. It is also strengthening during an atypical time of the year, which makes analogs more difficult to find over the historical record. The featured chart compares the 3 month averaged SOI value for August vs a three month average temperature for Iowa. For this metric, larger negative numbers are stronger El Niño. The left panel is colored by SOI value and compares the 3 month average temperature with precipitation. The right two panels isolate the temperature and precip values with SOI. Visually, more of the reddest dots appear within the bottom right quadrant of the left plot (wetter and cooler than average). The current longer term outputs from the CPC are generally neutral over the fall season. It will certainly be interesting to see what happens!

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