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Hawkwind writes:

The current El Nino continues to strengthen and will probably end next Spring.

"All international climate models surveyed by the Bureau of Meteorology indicate El Nino is likely to strengthen, and is expected to persist into early 2016," the bureau said. Those models project the event could last until next April.

A overview of what this means for the world can be found here.

Economic winners include the U.S., China, Mexico and Europe, while India, Australia and Peru are among El Nino's biggest losers.

California does have one potential remaining issue that could cause the drought to continue: The Blob.

It was a tangled feedback process between hot, dry soil, the strong ridge, and the blob — all working together to enhance the ridge itself, leading to more hot, dry weather. The wintertime pattern has been so domineering that West Coast meteorologists dubbed it the "ridiculously resilient ridge."

As a California resident with limited oceanic-atmospheric knowledge I wonder if anyone out there can add insight to the last article. It seems that this El Nino is really strong and the most The Blob can hope to do is to weaken it. All that energy needs to go somewhere.

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