This year's El Niño is finished — but get ready for La Niña

On Thursday, the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration said the El Niño that started in March 2015 is now over. "There's nothing left," said Mike Halpert, NOAA Climate Prediction Center deputy director. "Stick a fork in it, it's done."

The El Niño, which is a natural warming of parts of the central Pacific that causes weather changes around the world, was responsible for droughts in parts of India and Africa and one reason why the Pacific saw a record hurricane season. Global temperatures are also about 0.8 degrees warmer than after the 1998 El Niño. Halpert said this year's El Niño will go down as one of the three strongest on record, The Associated Press reports, and NOAA coral reef watch coordinator Mark Eakin said this El Niño caused "some of the worst coral bleaching and death of any event we've ever seen. We've had enough of this."

NOAA says there's a 50 percent chance we'll see El Niño's flip side, La Niña, by the end of summer and a 75 percent chance by the end of fall. A La Niña generally doesn't affect the amount of rain or temperatures in the United States during the summer, and in the winter, it usually brings heavy rain to areas of Australia and Indonesia and cooler temperatures to Canada, South America, Asia, and Africa.

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