The El Niño Briefing #2: The ocean said +2.6°C weeks ago. The atmosphere just voted

The number of the week isn't a sea-surface temperature.

It's +2.41 — the Multivariate ENSO Index for June–July, published by NOAA's Physical Sciences Laboratory. MEI folds pressure, surface winds and cloudiness in with the ocean heat, so it measures the thing SST alone can't: whether the atmosphere has actually joined the event. For June–July it now reads higher than any year in the record, which goes back to 1979.

Same two months, head to head:

• 2026: +2.41
• 1997: +2.27
• 2015: +1.79
• 1982: +1.65

That list is every "super" El Niño of the modern era, at the same point on the calendar. Comparing seasons to peaks would flatter the current event; compared season-to-season, it still leads.

Why it matters: an ocean warm patch without atmospheric backing fizzles — that's the difference between a blip and an event. A record MEI this early says the coupling is real. It is the strongest single argument yet that the October–December peak forecast (81% odds of "very strong", at least +2.0°C) is pointed the right way.

The rest of the board, as of this week:

• Weekly Niño 3.4: +2.6°C (NOAA, week centered August 5 — the next weekly reading lands Monday)
• RONI, the index NOAA now classifies by: +1.0°C, moderate — it strips out the background warming shared by the whole tropical ocean, which is why it runs cooler than the raw number. The gap between the two is the most misread thing in this event; the dashboard explains it side by side.
• ONI, the conventional seasonal index: +1.4°C for May–July.

What to watch next: Monday's weekly SST update, and whether MEI holds its lead when the July–August value publishes in early September. We'll cover both.

New on the site this week: the winter 2026–27 outlook region by region — and, for the skiers among you, an honest look at why the Alps sit outside this event's reach entirely.

— The El Niño Briefing

---

(чернетка для ревю; надсилання — через Buttondown, вручну)