Anybody notice NOAA has disappeared El Nino?

A couple of months ago, NOAA had declared a long-awaited El Nino event, after an unprecedented 54-month Nino-less period with two declared La Ninas and multiple abortive flirtations with El Nino status.

Their longstanding requirements for El Nino require at least five consecutive three-month averages at or above +0.5C. The new El Nino, as we've seen, inspired some commentators to literally incoherent levels of excitement:

Eric Holthas' unstoppable global juggernaught looked like this in the NOAA data:

And if you're thinking that looks pretty tame compared to the other El Ninos since 2003, you're right. In fact, those months were so marginal that they have now slipped out of El Nino status altogether. A few weeks ago NOAA made a quiet adjustment to its January-Febuary-March numbers, downward by 0.1C. This had the somewhat starting result of disappearing El Nino from NOAA's data:

Instead of a El Nino entering its eighth month, we now have two 3-month averages on either side of a Nino-spoiling 0.4C January-Febuary-March.

This means that when NOAA re-welcomes El Nino in a couple months, we will have had gap of 58 months, just a hair under 5 years, between El Nino events. Whereas the prior record was just 52 months (1959-1963, if you're curious.)

There is no serious point to this, other than the fact that scientists reassess and adjust data sets all the time, as better information becomes available. It's not the mark of a grand conspiracy to control a narrative, just researchers going about their business -- so routinely that a change like this can go almost unnoticed.

It's official: ENSO is fucking with us

We are now in the longest Nino-less period since NOAA record-keeping started:

Source

The last three-month period classified as El Nino was March-April-May of 2010. 51 months have passed since then (with more likely in the pipeline, given a 0.0 anomaly now.) This chart only goes back to 2002, but the full record shows what an anomaly this is. Fifty month gaps occur in 1959-1963 and again in 1978-1982. The present 51 months is longer than either.

So, how is this significant? Most simply, recent temperature trends are likely to under-estimate the long-term trends, unless a suppressed El Nino is a long-term consequence of AGW. That's possible, but most climate models predict El Nino will become more frequent and strong in a warmer world, rather than the converse.