See El Niño and La Niña on a map. Watch the Pacific warm and cool every month since 1982 using NOAA sea surface temperature data, follow the Oceanic Niño…
El Niño and La Niña are the two faces of a cycle in the Pacific Ocean that shifts rainfall, drought and storm patterns across the whole planet. This tool plays that cycle month by month from 1982 to the present, using NOAA sea surface temperature data.
Warm and cool anomalies are drawn directly on the ocean, so you can see the Pacific tilt back and forth rather than read about it.
The Oceanic Niño Index tracks the strength of each event, and the timeline marks the droughts, floods, fires and coral bleaching that arrived with the biggest of them — 1982-83, 1997-98, 2015-16.
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