On the progress of the 2015–2016 El Niño event

Abstract. It has been recently reported that the current 2015–2016 El Niño could become "one of the strongest on record". To further explore this claim, we performed the new analysis described in detail in Varotsos et al. (2015) that allows the detection of precursory signals of the strong El Niño events by using a recently developed non-linear dynamics tool. In this context, the analysis of the Southern Oscillation Index time series for the period 1876–2015 shows that the running 2015–2016 El Niño would be rather a "moderate to strong" or even a "strong" event and not “one of the strongest on record", as that of 1997–1998.