A La Niña weather event, which brings above-average rain, could be one of the things that steps in once El Niño steps out.

But what happens when the so-called Godzilla El Niño finally withers away?

Experts say there are three things that could come next — and one of them is far from ideal.

According to the Bureau of Meteorology, the peak in sea surface temperatures brought by El Niño is likely to happen in December before easing in the first three months of next year.

Already, sea temperatures in some areas of the tropical Pacific Ocean are 2.4C above average and even up to 3.0C in other parts — much higher than the 0.8C above average temperature that classifies El Niño.

Once those water temperatures finally begin to drop, Australia will be in for one of three possible outcomes: a return to neutral weather, extra wet conditions brought by La Niña, or the dreaded double El Niño.

The bureau’s supervisor of Climate Prediction Services Dr Andrew Watkins said it wouldn't be until autumn when one of those possible outcomes “makes up its mind”.

“During the first quarter of next year we expect El Niño to start to tail off ... that’s historically what we see,” he told news.com.au.

Drought has dried up Lake Lonsdale in western Victoria, thanks to El Niño, and it’s been a big inconvenience to water-loving locals. Picture: Alex CoppelSource:News Corp Australia

“Then we get to the end of autumn and it becomes a little less clear what might happen. That is the time of year when, basically, the ocean and the atmosphere decouple — they don’t work in tandem as much — and it becomes less easy to predict what will happen next.

“The most likely situation is that we’ll go into neutral conditions, back into a more normal weather pattern. About 60 per cent of the time we move into neutral patterns.

“But historically, around 40 per cent of the time, we have overshot the mark as we’ve cooled down from El Niño and gone into a La Niña event, when you tend to get wetter conditions.

“We saw this in 1997-98 when the big El Niño flipped into La Niña, we saw this in 1983 after the big 1983-83 El Niño event, we saw it in 1973 after the big 1972-73 El Niño.”

La Niña is somewhat El Niño’s polar opposite. While El Niño is associated with the warming of the central and eastern tropical Pacific, La Nina is associated with the cooling of those parts. El Niño brings dry conditions to Australia while La Niña ushers in above-average rainfall, mostly in Australia’s central and eastern regions.

Dr Watkins said two previous La Niña events, in 2010-11 and 2011-12, brought some of Australia’s most significant rainfall since around the early 1970s.

“Something like that would be good news for people in drought areas in western Queensland, western Victoria, southeast and southwest Australia and even Tasmania where it’s been very hot and dry,” he said.

This is one of two things we can reasonably expect when El Niño breaks down.Source:News Limited

“There's no guarantee that will happen of course, but it does happen during many of those big events.”

The third, less likely, outcome for a post-El Niño Australia would be thing already drought-struck farmers would dread the most — a double El Niño.

Simply, it’s just another El Niño year without a reprieve in between.

“Sometimes there can be a bit more rain in the autumn but by winter/spring you’re back into drier-than-average conditions and unfortunately that’s not a good thing at all when you’ve already had a bad winter and spring and in some cases, summer as well,” Dr Watkins said.

“But double El Niños are fairly rare: we’ve only had two in the past 120 years and it would be unusual to go into El Niño (again).”

LAND OF DROUGHT AND/OR FLOODING RAINS

As climate experts continue to warn of worsening conditions as El Niño reaches its December peak, farmers, firefighters and the rest of us are bracing for a tough summer ahead.

But will next year save us?

Dr Jaci Brown, Senior Research Scientist at the CSIRO, told news.com.au conditions could well be nudging us towards a welcome La Niña.

“In an El Niño, there’s warm water in the western Pacific Ocean, and the ocean acts to dispel that warm water and replace it with cold water, and that sets the ocean to be primed for a La Niña event,” she said.

“That’s why we’re more likely to see a La Niña after an El Niño. We should be in the right conditions for a La Niña to occur, the ocean wants one to occur, it’s just a matter of whether it ticks over or not.

A La Niña event could bring relief to drought affected properties, such this one west of Winton in Queensland.Source:News Corp Australia

“If it’s La Niña (that comes next), for a lot of primary industries that’s great news, and we need to figure out how to how to cash in on that to make up for the loss this year.

“In some cases farms might have let the paddocks go fallow because they know this was going to be a bad year, and it’s better off doing nothing, lowering your stock rates and taking it easy so you can take the biggest advantage of next year, if it’s going to be good.”

But she warned La Niña events were also associated with tropical cyclones.

Dr Seth Westra, senior lecturer at the University of Adelaide’s School of Civil, Environmental and Mining Engineering also said while rainfall was generally a good thing, there were always caveats.

“It could fill our reservoirs and provide ample water for agricultural or urban water supplies but it can an also lead to high risks of flooding that can affect the whole east coast of Australia and inland to the Murray-Darling region,” he told news.com.au.

“If you go back to the Queensland floods of 2010-11, which was a period where all the dams were pretty empty up until about spring and then all of a sudden there were heavy rains and floods, suddenly they had to deal with flood management rather than drought management.

“It’s certainly something that has happened before and could happen again.

“Having the right rain at the right time is the most important thing, and some crops tend to struggle if you get rainfall but not at the right time. Too much rain can cause damage as well.

“If the land is really baked and dry and you have a very heavy rain event it could cause potential erosion because of the sheer intensity of the rainfall, but if it’s a lighter sprinkling you don’t necessarily get those impacts.”

The Grantham floods in Queensland in 2011 killed 12 people and destroyed more than 50 homes.Source:Supplied

He said authorities would also need to prepare for how some dams coped with above average rain brought by La Niña.

“It depends on the nature of the dam, as some are purely for water supply and the ideal state is that they’re completely full — but for others, like the Wivenhoe Dam in Queensland, are partly for water supply and partly for flood prevention, which you could keep as empty as possible to provide that room to accommodate some of those floodwaters.

“For those sorts of dams having the right balance of the right water stored, so you don’t overreact and have it completely empty or vice versa, is really a critical thing to get right.”

Even though there was so much riding on which way weather patterns would swing, Dr Brown reiterated that it was very difficult to know what we were in for.

She said while we could look to the past to see how previous El Niño and La Niña events behaved, there’s one big thing clouding our judgment of the future — climate change.

“We know climate change is real and it’s happening and it’s changing the playing field, and changing they way things operate and the tools we use,” she said.

“We can’t necessarily look to the past and see that as a guarantee of how the future’s going to look because we just don’t know what the interactions between climate change and El Niño and La Niña is. We’re going blind a little bit.

“This is why it’s so important we measure our oceans, using satellites and buoys and ARGO floats (measuring temperature and salinity), and the integrated marine observing system (IMOS) that measure what’s happening in the ocean around Australia and how the ocean is flowing.

“What people don't realise is that our weather is controlled by the ocean — I know it can seem a bit far-fetched for someone in central Australia, but it’s those patterns in the ocean that determine advanced knowledge about climate.”