He's not ranting about El Nino, he's just back in the saddle. The SOI does produce a warming pulse and burst of westerlies over time, often enhancing a southern stream. What Joe is saying is that it needs to be taken into account if it continues as negative as it has been this month. I agree with that. After a strongly negative April, strongly positive May, we're now in a negative June (more negative recently than over the entire month). I attribute it to the typhoon burst over the last several days (and another one or two likely to form by the weekend). Also, they've had some "arctic" (antarctic) air in Austraila. Remember, it's winter over there right now.

As discussed last week, I see neutral conditions for the forseeable future. But El Nino conditions in some of the western zones obviously can't be ruled out if a) the SOI remains in the -30 range and b) warmer SSTA's start showing up in the next week or so near Austraila. I think it's less than 10% that all the ENSO regions in the Pacific go warmer by September or October, but it wouldn't be a stretch (say 40-50%) if some of the zones did.

We'll have to wait and see. In the meantime, the indexes from 6/1 through today have been:

19.2
9.0
-6.3
-1.9
10.3
9.9
-8.5
-8.1
-6.1
-0.6
6.2
0.8
-16.1
-13.2
-17.7
-23.2
-31.9
-36.0
-42.7
-44.4
-39.6
-28.0
-28.4

Steve