Unfortunately it's his own stuff. It's just another way of viewing it instead of the legacy SST anomalies. I think some of the faux Nino talk was also from some of the model forecast of SST anomalies. The Euro has had a big warm bias, but this time around the spread was much tighter. Also, the forecasts from previous months, and the actual values that the ensemble members started from...were fairly close. Another words, the Euro seasonal did not exhibit such a month to month warm bias like previous years had.