THERE has been little or no change in the long-term climatic indicators in the past couple of weeks.
In the Pacific Ocean, all of the El Nino-Southern Oscillation indicators, such as Southern Oscillation Index, the strength of the south-eastern trade winds, cloud amounts near the International Date Line as well as most of the sea surface temperatures in the tropical and western Pacific are all at neutral levels, while to the west in the Indian Ocean the Indian Ocean Dipole is also neutral even though it rarely influences our weather before later in April.
Most of the International models indicate that all these features are likely to stay neutral until at least the middle of winter, meaning they will have minimal effect of our weather in the coming months or, put another way, they won't be much help in trying to determine how the weather patterns will pan out in the coming months.
This is especially the case when in the past it has been a feature that ENSO predictions made during autumn tend to have lower accuracy than predictions made at other times of the year.
So, looking for anything else that might help with predictions, it is worth noting that SSTs remain above normal in the Coral Sea and Tasman Sea but also there are some warmer than normal waters in the tropical Pacific west of the Date Line as well, resulting in increasing cloudiness in the region.
This area of warmer water will slightly reduce the effect of the warm waters closer to the Australian coast.
However, warmer coastal water means increasing likelihood of occasional rain events when the synoptic patterns support such an occurrence.
So this brings us back to the scenario mentioned previously of at least near average rainfall in much of the eastern states in autumn and early winter, but these targets will only be achieved by the occasional but probably briefly significant one-off events.
This implies a high degree of variability as well. Two other things are fortunate at the moment. One is that the Pacific Ocean will not move into an El Nino in the foreseeable future.
The SST pattern in the tropical Pacific will help maintain the south-east trades which will help push moisture into eastern Australia for most of autumn at least.
Secondly, there are signs of more warmer water spreading into the north-east tropical Indian Ocean and if this continues, then the IOD is favoured to remain close to neutral well into the year and not return to the positive levels that contributed to rainfall shortages in 2019.
