Some Californians would like to think their brief but potent bouts of drought-busting storms were brought by what has been a marginal ocean warming of the tropical Pacific.
But San Francisco still just had its driest January on record.
And while some global weather patterns have been similar to what would be expected during an El Niño, the main characters of the phenomenon have not really set in.
This has baffled scientists since computer models had consistently predicted a major El Niño warming event would develop in 2014.
Australia’s Bureau of Meteorology says that temperatures across the Pacific have recently returned to a “neutral” level between what would be considered an El Niño and a La Niña.
But the Japan Meteorological Agency says the atmospheric jury is still out.
It predicts there is a 50 percent chance that El Niño will re-emerge during the Northern Hemisphere summer.