Temperature for an area of the Pacific Ocean west of Peru rose to 5.4 degrees above average for the week of November 11, exceeding the November 1997 temperatures for the same region during the most powerful El Niño on record. And according to climate scientists, the current event could have at least one more warming stage left.

David Swain, a climate scientist at Stanford University, told the Los Angeles Times, ““It does look like it’s possible that there’s still additional warming” to come.

On the other hand, accruing to the Los Angeles Times, the deputy director of the National Weather Service’s Climate Prediction Center, Mike Halpert, noted that the current El Niño has not yet had the impacts one might expect on the atmosphere and cautioned against reading too much into a single week’s high temperatures when predicting winter climates.

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Up to date information from the National Weather Service Climate Prediction Center is available here.