Over the next few months, the atmosphere failed to respond in order to reinforce the developing El Niño, with the monsoon trough remaining weak and tropical cyclone activity slowing, while no episodes of strong westerly winds at a low latitude occurred. Some of the oceanic indicators of El Niño also failed to develop further, with a cooling of sea and sub surface temperatures over the tropical Pacific occurring. However, by the end of 2014, several of the El Niño indexes that were used to judge the state of the ENSO state, indicated that weak El Nino conditions had developed over the Pacific Ocean. As a result, a few of the international meteorological agencies, including the Japan Meteorological Agency and the Hong Kong Observatory reported that an El Niño event had developed during 2014, while others such as the Fiji Meteorological Service considered 2014 to be a near miss. At this time it was thought that the ENSO state would continue to hover at the borderline El Nino conditions, before easing back into neutral ENSO conditions. After Typhoon Higos developed during February 2015, a new forecast scenario opened: El Niño might strengthen and persist through 2015. This scenario was supported by the same climate features that had predicted the weak El Niño developing during 2014. During their March 2015 diagnostic discussion, NOAA's CPC and the IRI reported that El Niño conditions had been observed during February 2015, after the above average sea surface temperatures had become weakly coupled with the tropical atmosphere. By January 2015, westerly wind burst activity picked up again. The first Kelvin wave developed around March and another formed around May. In addition, another strong westerly wind burst event took place around July as a result of twin tropical cyclones straddling the equator. An even stronger event in October, and an unusually stronger event during late December 2015 into January 2016, also resulted from twin cyclones on opposite sides of the equator. In May 2015, the Australian Bureau of Meteorology respectively confirmed the arrival of weak El Niño conditions. El Niño conditions were forecast in July to intensify into strong conditions by fall and winter of 2015. In addition to the warmer than normal waters generated by the El Niño conditions, the Pacific Decadal Oscillation was also creating persistently higher than normal sea surface temperatures in the northeastern Pacific. In August, the NOAA CPC predicted that the 2015 El Niño "could be among the strongest in the historical record dating back to 1950." In mid November, NOAA reported that the temperature anomaly in the Niño 3.4 region for the 3-month average from August to October 2015 was the 2nd warmest on record with only 1997 warmer.