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The Bureau of Meteorology has announced that La Niña is showing further signs of weakening, as sea surface temperatures have dropped into the neutral spectrum.
“Recent warming beneath the surface indicates that further weakening is likely in the coming weeks,” stated the bureau.
However, the bureau also noted an increasing likelihood of an El Niño event occurring between March and June.
“Looking ahead, the probability of El Niño is rising, though there is some uncertainty due to the typically lower accuracy of model forecasts during the spring,” the agency explained.
While some models hint at the development of El Niño from June, the Bureau of Meteorology remains cautiously reserved in its predictions.
“It should be noted that this is a very long lead time for such a prediction, and forecasts beyond autumn are highly uncertain, as reflected in the large spread across models and within ensemble members,” the bureau said.
Monash University’s School of Earth, Atmosphere and Environment adjunct professor Dr Andrew Watkins said it was still too early to predict El Niño, and forecasts will become clearer in the coming months.
“The second half of autumn, things start to become more settled, and it becomes predictions of what will happen for the rest of the year become more accurate,” he said.
The last El Niño event was in late 2023, which was the second-hottest year on record and led to record-breaking temperatures across Australia.
Watkins said these cyclical events will be intensified by climate change, but are not the only factors leading to extreme weather events in Australia.
“Globally, we’ve just had 2025 come in at the third warmest [year] and yet it was La Niña,” he said.
“In the old days, La Niña would give us a cooler year, not the third-warmest.
“We’re moving away from having to have El Niño or La Niña to give us those extremes. Unfortunately, climate change is playing a bigger role every year.”
El Niño and La Niña are part of a natural cycle known as the El Niño–Southern Oscillation and are sustained periods of neutral, warming or cooling in the central and eastern tropical Pacific, according to the Bureau of Meteorology.
El Niño is associated with warmer weather, while La Niña is cooler.
The El Niño–Southern Oscillation cycle loosely operates over periods of one to eight years.
These events occur when sea surface temperatures in the central and eastern tropical Pacific Ocean become substantially warmer than average, disrupting weather across the world.
In simple terms, Watkins describes it as like “steam off a kettle”.
“The El Niño really is a building up of warm water off South America, and we have cooler water near us, so the clouds form like white steam off a kettle, the clouds form over the warm water in South America,” he said.
“When we get La Niña, the warm water is near us and the cool water is near South America and so we tend to get the clouds forming in our part of the world and it’s wetter.
“The moisture follows the warm water.”
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