Southern Californians using newly purchased umbrellas as parasols and wearing sunscreen instead of rain slickers have been asking: Where is El Niño?

The answer from scientists, climatologists and weather forecasters is: Right here.

“No, it hasn’t gone away. It is still as strong as it ever was,” said Ken Clark, meteorologist with Accuweather.com in Southern California.

Huh?

With sunny skies and a week’s worth of summer-like weather spiking the mercury into the high 80s, how can that be true? Isn’t El Niño supposed to bring wet, stormy weather?

Be patient, says El Niño expert and climatologist Bill Patzert of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in La Cañada Flintridge. It’s coming.

“A month from now you’ll be writing about the March Miracle or the April Apocalypse,” he said, responding to what he calls the media’s unquenchable thirst for colossal storms and massive mudslides, neither of which has happened as predicted for Southern California.

Even Josh Willis says that local rains are coming. He’s the JPL project scientist for oceanography satellite Jason-3, the newest sea-temperature and sea-level reading tool used by climatologists to identify the current El Niño as the largest ever.

“Don’t throw out that umbrella just yet,” he said Tuesday.

All three scientists say El Niño will perform, but its arrival into Southern California has been delayed. They’re expecting a conveyor belt of squalls to enter stage left in late February and continue through March, possibly into April. This is a month or so later than original predictions for heavy rains.

Patzert says sometimes El Niños take their sweet time.

“It is not unusual for El Niños, with regards to Southern California rain, to be slow starters,” Patzert explained. “When they hook up, they are fast and furious finishers.”

Also, in cases of El Niño, size matters. This one is too big — about 21/2 times the size of the continental United States — and is having trouble maneuvering. But new satellite data from Feb. 4 show the El Niño has shrunk nearly 40 percent since the last capture on Jan. 23, Patzert said. The El Niño has receded east of Hawaii, whereas last month’s image showed it west of the islands, he said.

“As this signal shrinks, the jet stream should pull farther south” tracking storms into Southern California, he said.

The National Weather Service’s Climate Prediction Center in College Park, Maryland, released its monthly El Niño forecast on Thursday. It predicts a 50 percent to 60 percent probability of above-average rainfall in Southern California for March and April, with only 40 percent to 50 percent for Central California and 30 percent to 40 percent for Northern California, said John Gottschalck, chief of the center’s operational prediction branch.

In short, it reiterated a prediction of El Niño-patterned weather for Southern California. Namely, weakened westward-blowing trade winds and a warming of the upper ocean in the central and eastern Pacific will alter the jet stream, pulling storms into the West Coast, much like what happened during the last El Niño in February and March 1998.

Another reason for El Niño’s slow start is its entanglement with a high-pressure system over Utah that brought dry, hot weather into Southern California over the past week and a half. More importantly, the high-pressure dome pushed the jet stream north, sending El Niño-fueled storms into Central and Northern California in January and the Pacific Northwest and western Canada in February. This has increased Sierra snowpack to 105 percent, a positive sign for breaking the drought.

Calling it a “short-term” phenomena, Clark says the high pressure has begun to fade, with the National Weather Service predicting “a slight chance” or rain on Thursday. However, serious rain is not expected until the end of the month. “There may be more stormy patterns as we get into the end of February and into March,” he said.

Of course, no one can say for sure what El Niño will do. But scientists are hardly reprimanding El Niño, Spanish for “the child.” They are giving it a second chance.

“The ball game is not over yet. We do have a lot of innings left in the game,” Gottschalck said. “ We still have March.”

Staff Writer Jason Henry contributed to this report.