El Niño 2026
Drought is what arrives minus what leaves. Most maps measure only the arriving half
An El Niño developed through 2026. The question that follows is always the same: where will it be dry, and how dry.
Drought is a balance. Water arrives as rain and leaves as evaporation, and the atmosphere’s capacity to pull it out varies on its own, driven by temperature, humidity, wind and sunlight. Both halves have standard, well-documented indices behind them. In practice almost everything published measures the first half and stops.
This series measures both, globally, across seventy-six years of record, and asks what El Niño does to each. Nothing here is a new method. The indices are the ones climate services already run, and the framework for turning them into events dates to 1967. What is unusual is the combination, and the insistence on reporting how much the record can actually carry.
The posts are interleaved with unrelated ones on the main blog, so this page is the reading order. Each post also links to the next one in the series rather than to whatever was published next.
2026
Two halves of a balance. What arrives, what leaves, how long each lasts, and how far forty-four events will stretch.
1. A very strong El Niño is forecast
14 August 2026
In six months the Pacific swung from La Niña to El Niño, and the official outlook has it climbing past anything in the record. For four consecutive seasons the central forecast sits above every value observed since 1950.
2. Which El Niño are you measuring?
16 August 2026
In February 2026 the Climate Prediction Center changed the index it uses to classify El Niño. The two indices disagree by 0.41 degrees right now, and the choice moves the map on 95 per cent of land.
3. Forty-four events
19 August 2026
Seventy-six years of record contains forty-four ENSO events. Twenty-two are El Niño, eight of those are strong, and every single one of the eight is the same flavour. That is the whole evidence base.
4. Two ways to see a drought, and what they are made of
22 August 2026
Drought is what arrives minus what leaves, and almost everything published measures only the first. This post builds the second, finds that a thirty-year baseline cannot express two of its own eleven categories, and then sets out what all of it is made of.
5. Seventy-five years of dry spells
25 August 2026
Run theory on both halves of the water balance at four accumulation lengths. Globally El Niño changes almost nothing. Over the Maritime Continent it changes the share of months that come in below the dry mark by nineteen points, and it does it by starting more spells rather than longer ones.
6. Where the two halves disagree
28 August 2026
The hypothesis this project was built to test was that El Nino makes some places wet and thirsty at once. On land where both responses are solid, that combination is 0.3 per cent. What is there instead is worse.
7. Where it is right now
4 September 2026
Not a forecast and not a composite: the observed state of both halves of the water balance through August 2026. The Sahel is at SPI-3 of -2.39, half the Maritime Continent is already in a dry spell, and a quarter of the world’s land is dry on one axis while looking ordinary on the other.
8. What history says happens next
6 September 2026
The strongest matching seasons on record, composited. Rainfall at 61 per cent of normal across the Maritime Continent, five analogues out of five agreeing, and a correction that has to be applied before any of it can be read.
9. Where it bites, and when it arrives
8 September 2026
Evaluating the fitted relationship at a forecast beyond anything used to fit it. The chance of a record season runs four to five times higher than chance, about half of that is the warming trend, most of the world has no business being asked, and where the effect does arrive it arrives early and does not stay.
10. Into early 2027, and what forty-four events support
10 September 2026
The closing post. What the horizon looks like once the warming trend is taken out, how little independent information nine hundred months contains, and the three things this project got wrong and had to fix.
10 posts, 14 August 2026 to 10 September 2026.