El Nino forecast ‘neutral', but Australian drought could be relieved

La Nina continued to weaken during March as surface temperature anomalies in the Pacific Ocean decreased, with both the Australian Bureau of Meteorology and the American Climate Prediction Center moving the weather phenomenon’s status to "neutral" this week.

The center said there was more than a 50% chance that the weather phenomenon would remain neutral throughout the Northern Hemisphere summer 2018, although Australia might experience wetter-than-average weather.

This season's La Nina weather phenomenon has scorched crops in Argentina, causing prices to spike and left crushers to scrambling to buy soybeans from North America.

Rain will be welcomed in Australia, where key cereal growing regions has received less than 1mm of rain since the start of April. 

The rains would be caused by a possible negative Indian Ocean Dipole (IOD) event during Australia’s spring and winter, the Bureau of Meteorology said, but remained conservative in its prediction as only two out of six models currently indicate negative IOD.

An IOD event is a similar weather pattern to an El Nino but occurs in the equatorial Indian Ocean between the Arabian Sea and the Indian Ocean to the south of Indonesia.

“The three-month outlook remains moderate, with most of Australia facing a moderate chance of meeting average rainfall between April and June,” Rabobank said Thursday after the weather updates were published.