The next El Niño: when is it coming and how strong might this one be for Australia?

Spanning more than 12,000km along the equator and between 100 and 200 metres below the surface of the Pacific Ocean, there is a massive blob of warm water.

"You can compare it to a loaded gun," says Prof Axel Timmermann, the director of the IBS Center for Climate Physics at Pusan National University in South Korea. "The magazine is full, but the atmosphere hasn't pulled the trigger yet."

"We need to remember this is a coupled system," she says. "The ocean and the atmosphere both need to respond. The winds are really important."

To be really confident, forecasters will be waiting until May or June.

While the drying affected the vast eastern two-thirds of the continent, areas along the populated eastern seaboard, including Brisbane and Sydney, were less affected.

But Timmermann and others have warned it's too early to have much confidence in those predictions.

Brown says the memories of the catastrophic and unprecedented black summer bushfires of 2019 and 2020 shouldn't be forgotten.

"We are now primed for bushfires with this record [vegetation] growth. I feel we're primed for one of the worst bushfire seasons ever."

Taschetto and Brown say understanding the dynamics of Enso is an active area of research and there is still more to understand.