The National Climate Prediction Center publishes monthly reports and predictions for El Nino and La Nina. Here is a link to their website.

http://www.cpc.ncep.noaa.gov/products/analysis_monitoring/enso_advisory/ensodisc.html

The trickly phrase to comprehend here is MJO or Madden-Julian Oscillations. Hard to describe, but easier while looking at time lapse temperature maps.

Direct quote from the NWS Climate Prediction Center:

A majority of the SST forecasts indicate a continuation of ENSO-neutral conditions (-0.5?C to 0.5?C in the Ni񯭳.4 region) into the first half of 2009 (Fig. 5). Several dynamical models suggest the development of a La Ni񡠤uring Northern Hemisphere Winter 2008-09. This outcome becomes more likely if the current MJO were to stall in a location that favors enhanced low-level easterlies and increased upwelling in the east-central and eastern Pacific. However, it is rare for La Ni񡠴o develop late in the year. Therefore, based on current atmospheric and oceanic conditions and recent trends, ENSO-neutral conditions are expected to continue into early 2009.

Brett:

Since the thread called "Digging Hard to Find the Right Answers" is now mostly forgotten, I wanted to take the opportunity to make a correction here. The confusion comes from using two data sets and talking about them as though they were one. Willis did an ocean heat content paper in 2004. This paper used data from 1993 to 2003. The chart that you show in your post was from that paper. As you can see for yourself, the data set that is marked as original data is not a cooling data set, it is warming without any changes. In fact on that data set, the revised data has less of a warming trend than the original data. As you can also see from that chart, the data ends in 2003. Now, the data correction that you are talking about was something that came about later. It is from a 2006 paper that was done by Willis, Lyman, Johnson and Gilman. In that paper they originally had a 2003 to 2006 dataset that showed strong cooling. After they discovered the errors to Argo and XTB, they corrected the data and it no longer showed any cooling. However, it did not show warming either. Here is the final sentence for the abstract from that paper.

Reply: I will not argue with that.

"With biased profiles discarded, no significant warming or cooling is observed in upper-ocean heat content between 2003 and 2006."

http://ams.allenpress.com/perlserv/?request=get-abstract&doi=10.1175%2F2008JTECHO608.1&ct=1

After Willis found the corrections for his 2006 paper, he also made those corrections for his 93 to 03 dataset. That is the correction that your chart shows.

The important thing to take away from this is that Willis has ocean heat content for 2003 to 2006 as being flat, not rising.

Given the importance that Willis places on the correlation between heat content and sea level, we should also note that there has been no rise in sea level for the past 3 years.

http://reallyrealclimate.blogspot.com/2008/06/university-of-colorado-global-sea-level.html

This most likely means that the ocean heat content has not risen for 2007 and possibly 2008.
If this turns out to be the case, we will have gone 5 to 6 years without any rise in the ocean heat content.