Sorry for large pics. I'm on my phone.
Interesting tidbit I found. It appears we're completely neutral between El Nina and El Nino right now. With TNI values at a measly +0.14 currently. Maybe this explains the low performance of April.
However, I tried my best to get my head around
@Fred Gossage and
@Matt Grantham 's MJO amplification theory and did some poking around on Tropical Tidbits, and it looks like we could be transitioning into an amplified MJO. Hard to say.
This is the CFS weekly model's 200mb CHI anomalies for 1 and 4 weeks from now. Don't know wtf CHI means and not having any luck finding out with Google, but that's well defined as hell. (Edit: it might mean cloud height indicators, which measures the lowest cloud layers covering more than half the sky)
This is +1 week (our potential outbreak)
This is +4 weeks
I also tried digging around with sea surface temp anomalies, but since we're in a neutral phase it's really hard to get a good read. It looks like a moderately amplified MJO for our potential outbreak here too. I also calculated a TNI for this period of somewhere between -1.25 and -1.5.
Fred and Matt haven't been active for a little while, so if you search their recent posts you can see the theories I'm talking about. If anyone who has access to paid forecasting tools can look at the models they used in their study and report back I'd be extremely interested in your findings.