El Niño is active and strengthening

Is the event still being fed?

Warm water piles up below the thermocline before it ever reaches the surface, so the upper-300 m heat content leads Niño 3.4 by roughly one to three months. A reservoir that keeps filling under a flat surface means more warming is still to come; one that drains means the event is running out of fuel however warm the surface still looks.

The eastern half is the half that surfaces first, and it currently reads 2.96 °C — up on the month, so the reservoir is still filling.

The single number above integrates the downwelling Kelvin wave driving the event. CPC also publishes the full depth–longitude structure as an animation — see the equatorial cross-section on CPC GODAS →

Source: NOAA CPC equatorial upper-300 m mean temperature anomaly (1981–2010 climatology), 1979–present. Updated monthly by CPC; anomalies are against the 1981–2010 climatology, which is a different baseline from the 1991–2020 one used for the weekly Niño 3.4 value — compare directions, not absolute figures across the two.

The atmosphere's vote

The headline numbers read the ocean. The Multivariate ENSO Index folds sea-surface temperature, sea-level pressure, surface winds and cloudiness into one figure, so it registers whether the atmosphere has actually joined the ocean — the coupling that separates a warm blip from a genuine event.

For Jun–Jul 2026, MEI.v2 stands at +2.41 — the highest Jun–Jul value in the record, back to 1979. It climbed there from negative, La Niña-leaning values at the start of 2026.

Source: NOAA PSL Multivariate ENSO Index Version 2 (MEI.v2), 1979–present. Bi-monthly (two-month overlapping seasons), updated monthly by NOAA PSL. Compared against each event at the same season, so the comparison advances with the calendar.