Thank you for the kind words and for your question! I think the answer relates to Aaron Levine's guest post, which demonstrates that the amount of warm subsurface water in the spring is not a reliable indicator of ENSO conditions in the following fall and winter, particularly when the warm water volume anomalies are relatively small and positive, like this year. With that said, I am not sure why so many of the NMME models are as confident about a return to La Nina as they are, although even those models indicate a wide range of outcomes, mostly between neutral and La Nina conditions. So, I do not think that the current subsurface ocean conditions preclude a return to La Nina by next fall, but I am also curious about what is driving some of the model forecasts.