Claim: So it’s been a surprise to climate scientists that 2017 has been so remarkably warm — because the last El Niño ended a year ago.

Relevance (1 = gold evidence, 0 = mined hard negative): 1
Passage: The 2014–16 El Niño was a warming of the eastern equatorial Pacific Ocean that resulted in unusually warm waters developing between the coast of South America and the International Date Line.

Relevance (1 = gold evidence, 0 = mined hard negative): 1
Passage: However, over time the term has evolved and now refers to the warm and negative phase of the El Niño–Southern Oscillation and is the warming of the ocean surface or above-average sea surface temperatures in either the central and eastern tropical Pacific Ocean.

Relevance (1 = gold evidence, 0 = mined hard negative): 1
Passage: A study of climate records has shown that El Niño events in the equatorial Pacific are generally associated with a warm tropical North Atlantic in the following spring and summer.

Relevance (1 = gold evidence, 0 = mined hard negative): 1
Passage: About half of El Niño events persist sufficiently into the spring months for the Western Hemisphere Warm Pool to become unusually large in summer.

Relevance (1 = gold evidence, 0 = mined hard negative): 1
Passage: La Niña (/lɑːˈniːnjə/, Spanish pronunciation: [la ˈniɲa]) is a coupled ocean-atmosphere phenomenon that is the colder counterpart of El Niño, as part of the broader El Niño–Southern Oscillation climate pattern.

Relevance (1 = gold evidence, 0 = mined hard negative): 0
Passage: El Niño–Southern Oscillation (ENSO) is a coupled ocean-atmosphere phenomenon in the Pacific Ocean responsible for most of the global variability in temperature, and has a cycle between two and seven years.

Relevance (1 = gold evidence, 0 = mined hard negative): 0
Passage: La Niña (, ) is a coupled ocean-atmosphere phenomenon that is the counterpart of El Niño as part of the broader El Niño Southern Oscillation climate pattern.

Relevance (1 = gold evidence, 0 = mined hard negative): 0
Passage: The exceptionally warm El Niño year of 1998 was an outlier from the continuing temperature trend, and so subsequent annual temperatures gave the appearance of a hiatus: by January 2006, it appeared to some that global warming had stopped or paused.

Relevance (1 = gold evidence, 0 = mined hard negative): 0
Passage: "El Niño in a changing climate".

Relevance (1 = gold evidence, 0 = mined hard negative): 0
Passage: El Niño–Southern Oscillation (ENSO) is an irregularly periodic variation in winds and sea surface temperatures over the tropical eastern Pacific Ocean, affecting the climate of much of the tropics and subtropics.

Relevance (1 = gold evidence, 0 = mined hard negative): 0
Passage: "Contrasting the termination of moderate and extreme El Niño events in coupled general circulation models".

Relevance (1 = gold evidence, 0 = mined hard negative): 0
Passage: El Niño is the warm phase of the El Niño–Southern Oscillation (ENSO) and La Niña the cold phase.

Relevance (1 = gold evidence, 0 = mined hard negative): 0
Passage: El Niño events cause short-term (approximately 1 year in length) spikes in global average surface temperature while La Niña events cause short term cooling.