NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in La Cañada Flintridge, Calif., confirmed the phenomenon yesterday:
“The ocean has warmed up a little bit more. ... It’s certainly still a strong event,” said Mike Halpert, deputy director of the Climate Prediction Center. Halpert said this El Niño still isn’t quite as strong as the current record holder, the El Niño that developed in 1997, but it’s “still respectable. Probably the second strongest we’ve seen at this time of year.”
“We certainly favor a wetter-than-average winter,” Halpert said. Though he cautioned that “when you’re dealing with climate predictions, you can never get a guarantee,” he added, “this could be one of the types of winters like in 1997-98.”
That winter was dramatic for California. Heavy rains came to Orange County in December 1997, dropping an astonishing 7 inches of rain in some parts of the region, flooding mobile home parks in Huntington Beach and forcing crews to use inflatable boats to make rescues, while mudslides destroyed hillside homes.
El Niño rains started in Los Angeles County in January 1998, and were the worst across the region in February. Downtown L.A. got about a year’s worth of rain in February alone.
California needs rain, sure; but they need rain over a long period of time so that they can capture it in reservoirs without it blowing away infrastructure.
Despite the likelihood of massive rainfalls this winter, California is still experiencing record drought. The "record," unfortunately, only goes back a few centuries, so we really don't know what "normal" is over several millennia. Regardless, this winter will not be normal by any measure, if the world's climatologists are correct.