NOAA: 82% chance of El Niño this fall Play

The U.S. government has confirmed what weather experts have been guessing about over the past few months: California is about to get walloped by some big storms this fall.

NOAA, the ocean experts, say there is now an 82% chance that El Niño is likely to emerge over the next few months. That's up from the 61% chance estimated a month ago. And there's now a 96% chance that the climate pattern is about to shift in a major way.

Think hot, muggy weather this fall. Think thunderstorms and maybe tropical storms and hurricanes arriving in Malibu. Think of a major storm track bringing pineapple express rain plumes up from the subtropics into Southern California — storm after storm.

And while we're about to get a big El Niño, scientists stress that we're still really not sure how global warming will affect it. In the last 20 years, El Niños have not been extremely wet, and La Niñas have not been unusually dry. That's according to Marty Ralph, the director of the Center for Western Weather and Water Extremes at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography.

Bottom line: buckle up. It's going to be a stormy summer and fall. Or maybe not.