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.
The whole series, in six findings
Globally, El Nino barely touches dry spells. It raises the share of dry months by one to fourteen per cent of itself, which is real and close to useless. Rainfall moves around the tropics rather than leaving the planet.
Regionally it changes a great deal. Nineteen more months in every hundred come in short of rain over the Maritime Continent, with the sign reversed over southwestern North America.
It starts dry spells rather than stretching them, by up to 1.9 times in onsets against at most 1.16 in duration. A monitor already watching a spell would not see it coming.
Both halves of the balance move together, not apart. The case this project was built to find, normal rain with abnormal thirst, is 0.3 per cent of the land where both responses are solid. The other 99.7 per cent sits on the diagonal.
Record-breaking evaporative demand runs four to five times likelier than chance across the coming seven seasons, and about half of that is the warming trend rather than the Pacific.
On 56 to 74 per cent of land the relationship predicts nothing. Hide a season, refit, predict it, and the fit does worse than guessing that season’s own average. The series is really about the 18 per cent where it holds, and the maps do not look like they are.
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, and nothing in the record matches it
14 August 2026
In six months the Pacific swung from La Niña to El Niño conditions, 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? The index changed this year
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 ENSO events, and only eight that can answer anything
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. Drought has two halves, and most maps measure one
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. El Niño starts dry spells, it does not make them longer
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. Rain and thirst move together under El Niño, which is worse news
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 the world is dry right now, in rainfall and in thirst
8 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 the five closest El Niños did to the land
9 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 El Niño drought risk is real, and where it is not
10 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 how little forty-four events support
11 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 11 September 2026.