Thanks for the blog.  I find it very informative.  I have a question though.  In this post you state that El Niño often leads to higher air surface temperatures, which would lead to higher sea surface temperatures.  You reference an earlier post, which gives the reason for the increase in air surface temperatures.  As I understood it, the reason for higher surface temps during El Niño was due to higher evaporation off the ocean, leading to increased transfer of latent heat from the ocean to the atmosphere.  In other words, we're transferring more heat from ocean to atmosphere during El Niño.  

My question is how can the SST be expected to go up during El Niño when the latent heat flux out of the ocean is expected to be higher?  Does that mean the conductive transfer of heat in from the atmosphere outweighs the increased advective latent heat flux out?  I'm not a climate scientist, and I'm not doing the calculation right now, but I would usually predict that advective latent heat flux moves more heat than conduction.  In addition, during El Niño, the higher evaporation leads to more cloud formation, which also reduces the radiant heat influx to the ocean.  So, from my simplistic understanding, I see that during El Niño we have increased heat advective heat flux out of the ocean, and reduced radiant heat flux in to the ocean.  So, I'm having a hard time seeing how El Niño would result in an increased global SST.  I guess I would intuitively predict the opposite.