The Pacific Region Panel invites you to join the third edition of its webinar series on ENSO:

 

 

Speaker: Michelle L'Heureux - NOAA

 

You can Sign up th ENSO Webinars Mailing list here

 

This presentation examines the operational processes of making routine El Niño-Southern Oscillation (ENSO) predictions within a National Meteorological and Hydrological Service.  Michelle will discuss initialized multi-model ensembles and their prediction skill, and how these ensembles are synthesized into the official outlooks at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.  The presentation will cover the recent shift to the Relative Oceanic Niño Index (RONI) as the primary observational and verification metric for official ENSO predictions.  Finally, ongoing challenges in ENSO prediction will be addressed, with examples of how lessons from the past help to inform the current 2026-27 El Niño outlook.  

 

Michelle L'Heureux is a physical scientist at National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's Climate Prediction Center near Washington DC, where she has worked for 20 years.  For the last 17 years, she has led the El Niño-Southern Oscillation team, which is responsible for regularly issuing NOAA updates on El Niño and La Niña.  She has previously served as co-chair of the US CLIVAR Predictability, Predictions, and Applications Interface Panel (PPAI) and was a U.S. expert on the Task Team on World Meteorological Organization (WMO) accredited ENSO information. Michelle is an author or co-author on over 60 journal articles on sub-seasonal to seasonal climate variability and prediction.