I’m guessing we’ll have an El Niño this year. We’ve got 4 fur seal pups in rehabilitation this year, and we always get fur seal pups before El Niños - we had 30 before the largest recent El Niño in 1997.
Are you ready? I’m making sure all my rain gear and boots are Nikwaxed.
What are the preparations needed for this? I thought the symptoms varied according to location; for most people, it just means “windier.”
Or you could just, y’know, check the NOAA El Niño monitoring page.
I sure hope we don’t get one. I love winter, and that’d really affect the winter here in the Pacific Northwest.
Woah… if four fur seal pups were to show up at my door, El Nino would be the least of our worries.
True, for most people. For those of us who live on the coast, it’s a little more of a big deal. Storms in December 2002 knocked out my electricity for a week. Giant bulbs of kelp washed up 200 yards from the beachfront, and some poor kid lost his backpack because it was washed away by a wave. It’s not the end of the world, but I just want to make sure I’m ready for the rains and waves.
Right, then. I’m ready. Thanks for asking! 
Yeah, I was going to ask where the OP lives…maybe So Cal or Arizona.
El Nino creates drought in Portland…but at least the potential for nasty assed ice storms goes up.
Near San Francisco, on the coastal side. I guess I’m just a little more vulnerable to it than a lot of other posters.
Isn’t it great - El Niño’s got a little something for everyone! 
Is it just me, or does it seem like every year, almost, there’s either an el nino or la nina or ninocito? (OK, I made that last one up.) I thought these things were supposed to be relatively rare – are there more now than there used to be?
In Saskatchewan an el nino winter normally means a warmer than usual winter. Which is not a bad thing at all. A fairly common reaction here to the el nino, is more the “woohoo” response, rather than an “oh no” response.
There’s definitely not an El Nino every year, but last year was odd off the California coast for delayed upwelling and unusually warm water temperatures - typically signs of an El Nino, but one didn’t materialize. It was also odd for an unusually rainy spring, but not at the time one would expect El Nino rains to come.
Also, as we get better instrumentation, it’s easier to detect changes in temperature at the sea surface, and lots of speculation takes place as to whether these are parts of the El Nino/La Nina cycle.
Finally, there are some who think that the time between El Ninos has been shortened by increasing sea temperatures in the Pacific (one of the symptoms of global warming), so it’s possible that El Nino actually is becoming more common.