In the highlight section of today's U.S. medium range forecast, the cooling of the Nino12 SSTA region off the northwest coast of South America is identified. The 30-day SSTA change is a whopping -2.27C. El Nino's demise is ahead and La Nina for later this year is on the way.

The subsurface equatorial Pacific Ocean is cooling dramatically and offers a guarantee that El Nino will weaken rapidly during APR/MAY with La Nina likely to quickly follow by mid-year.

The Madden Julian oscillation (MJO) has been very active since last September. The 5th transient MJO across the equatorial Pacific recently ended and MJO is now shifting across the tropical Atlantic and heading back to home base in the Indian Ocean tropics in early April. The 15-day forecast utilizing all models indicates an eastward shift reaching Maritime Continent in 2 weeks with marginally moderate intensity is likely.

The lunar eclipse on Sunday April 7 begins at 1:27CDT in Texas and ends at 3:35EDT in Maine. The projected cloud cover for the event indicates most of the track has cloud obscuration according to GFS.