El Niño Won't Break — And It's Making Everything Worse For America...

[00:00:00]The Pacific Ocean is doing something it has not done at this speed in the entire modern satellite record. And the consequences for the United States are no longer theoretical.

[00:00:11]Let that settle for a moment. Not theoretical. Happening right now, not in winter, not next spring, this summer.

[00:00:20]Today, July 22nd, 2026, the Nino 3.4 C surface temperature anomaly sits at plus 2.1°.

[00:00:29]That number comes directly from the International Research Institute at Columbia University, updated just days ago on July 15th. 7 weeks ago, it was at plus0.98.

[00:00:42]The jump in 6 weeks is not normal. The ocean does not warm that fast unless something large is organizing beneath the surface, and something large is. The Climate Prediction Center confirmed El Nino conditions on June 11th, upgrading from watch to advisory. The question is no longer whether El Nino is here. The question is how strong it gets, how fast, and what it is already doing to your summer right now. And here is what it is doing. 46.5% of the contiguous lower 48 states are in drought as of the most recent US drought monitor release dated July 14th. Salt Lake City, Utah, set an all-time temperature record on July 12th at 109° F.

[00:01:28]Billings, Montana, shattered its all-time record that same day at 111°.

[00:01:34]Mile City, Montana reached 115°, topping its previous record by more than 2°.

[00:01:41]The National Weather Service office in Billings confirmed those numbers.

[00:01:45]Sheridan, Wyoming hit 109.

[00:01:49]These are not one day anomalies. These are stations that have been keeping records for over a century. And every single one of them fell on the same afternoon. That is what a coupled El Nino heat dome does when it locks over the northern Rockies. This is why today's video matters. El Nino is not waiting for winter. It is already reshaping the summer pattern in ways that are going to affect your energy bills, your air quality, your water supply, and the wildfire smoke you may be breathing this week. I am going to walk you through exactly what the data shows right now, what the models are projecting through late summer and into fall, and what this event means for 2027 and beyond. Because the story is larger than one summer. Before we get into the deeper data, I want to be direct about something. The models I track every single day, the GFS, the European, the CFSV2, they are in rare agreement right now.

[00:02:44]Not just on the existence of El Nino, but on the trajectory. 23 of the 26 models in the mid July CCSR and IRI ensemble forecast a very strong El Nino with Nino 3.4 anomalies at or above plus2° C at peak. For reference, the strongest event in modern history, 1997 through 1998, peaked at about plus 2.5.

[00:03:10]The strongest since that was 2015 through 2016 at roughly plus 3. The current trajectory in this event already mirrors those early signatures. Noah itself puts the probability of a very strong El Nino peaking in October through December 2026 at 63%.

[00:03:29]I am Arthur and this is Sky Space Lab.

[00:03:33]If you are new here and you want the science behind the headlines, not the headlines themselves, hit subscribe.

[00:03:40]This is where the data lives. Now, let me show you what the current pattern looks like across the country because El Nino does not hit everywhere the same way. There is a dramatic east-west split happening right now and it is visible in almost every data product I track. West of the Rockies and especially in the Pacific Northwest, Northern California, Idaho, Montana, Wyoming, Utah, and Nevada, you are dealing with a classic El Nino summer response. The jetream is riding unusually high and northward which keeps the storm track suppressed and allows a persistent ridge of high pressure to dominate. That ridge is what produced the heat dome events of early and mid July. When a ridge sits over the northern Rockies, it acts like a lid on the atmosphere. Air sinks and compresses and warms. Moisture from the Pacific cannot punch through. The result is exactly what the drought monitor shows.

[00:04:33]Severe to extreme drought is expanding, not contracting, across Oregon, Washington, Idaho, and northern California. The most recent drought monitor report noted that the seven Colorado River basin states, Arizona, California, Colorado, Nevada, New Mexico, Utah, and Wyoming, all recorded temperatures running 3 to 6° above normal for the reporting week, with parts of northeast Wyoming and Montana running 6 to 12° above average. That is not a heat wave. That is a pattern. East of the Mississippi, the story is almost the opposite. The subtropical jet, which El Nino tends to enhance and push southward, is pumping moisture and instability into the south and southeast at a rate that is producing frequent heavy rainfall events. Texas, Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama, Georgia, the Carolas, they are seeing above normal precipitation in episodic bursts.

[00:05:38]Parts of the southeast that were in flash drought just weeks ago have seen meaningful improvement.

[00:05:44]That split is exactly what the climate prediction cent's seasonal outlook predicted and it is verifying on schedule. Here is what I want you to think about for a moment. If you are in Phoenix right now, you are dealing with temperatures that have been running in the 110° range on multiple days this month. If you are in Atlanta, you are dealing with humidity and afternoon storms and rain. If you are in Seattle, you are looking at smoke and air quality alerts from wildfires burning to your east. Same country, same week, three completely different weather realities.

[00:06:20]El Nino is the architect of that divergence. Drop your city in the comments right now. I want to know exactly where you are watching from and what this summer has felt like on the ground. The contrast in this country right now is genuinely striking. And hearing from people across different regions tells me something about how broadly the current pattern is being felt. Now, let me walk you through what the next seven days look like dayby day.

[00:06:45]July 23rd through July 25th, the western heat dome is expected to persist across the Great Basin and Northern Rockies.

[00:06:53]Temperatures in Salt Lake City will remain in triple digits through at least Wednesday. Portland and Seattle will see above average temperatures, but not the extreme records of mid July.

[00:07:04]The monsoon boundary is creeping northward into southern Arizona and New Mexico, and storm activity there will increase through the end of the week.

[00:07:12]The North and West Climate Prediction Cent's 6 to 10day outlook valid for July 21st through July 25th shows a wetter than normal signal for Arizona, New Mexico, Utah, and Colorado.

[00:07:24]Locally, 2 to 5 ines are possible in southern and southwestern Arizona from the North American monsoon.

[00:07:31]The Gulf Coast and Southeast will see scattered heavy rain events associated with a stalling frontal boundary. Parts of Mississippi, Alabama, and Georgia should see 1 to 2 in of rain through Thursday with isolated flash flood potential in low-lying areas along river systems already running high from earlier rains. July 26 through July 28th, a shortwave trough is expected to drop southward out of Canada and begin eroding the western ridge by late in the week. This will bring some temperature relief to Montana, Idaho, and parts of Wyoming. However, the trough passage will also bring gusty winds ahead of a frontal boundary, and those winds combined with extreme low humidity and fireprone areas represent the highest fire weather threat of the week. Red flag warnings are likely across much of Idaho and eastern Oregon during this window. Fire weather is not just about temperature. It is about the combination of low relative humidity, dry vegetation, and wind. Right now, all three are present across the northern Rockies in a way that keeps fire danger elevated, even on days when the extreme heat backs off slightly.

[00:08:39]July 29th through 31st. Both the GFS and the European agree that the ridge rebuilds somewhat across the southwest as the trough exits to the east. This means another round of above average temperatures is likely for California, Nevada, and Utah heading into the final days of July. Meanwhile, the trough moving into the central plains with increased severe weather potential across Nebraska, Kansas, and Missouri through the weekend. The Storm Prediction Center does not yet have a formal outlook at this range, but ensemble guidance is pointing toward at least a scattered severe weather setup across the central plains by July 30th and 31st. Damaging winds and large hail will be the primary hazards, though an isolated tornado cannot be ruled out if a discrete supercell can hold together ahead of the main convective line.

[00:09:30]Now, let me slow down because the next segment is the one I have been building toward. The ocean does not lie. And right now, the ocean is telling a very clear story about what the rest of 2026 looks like. The Nino 3.4 index hit plus 2.1° C in the week centered on July 15th. In June 2026, the monthly average was plus 1.55°.

[00:10:00]That means in approximately 6 weeks the index moved more than half a degree upward. To put that in context, during the 1997 through 1998 Super El Nino, the index was at roughly plus 1.8 in early July of 1997.

[00:10:18]The current trajectory is either matching or exceeding that pace. Let me be precise about the atmospheric coupling because this is the mechanism that locks the event in. The equatorial southern oscillation index declined to minus 1.4 in June 2026.

[00:10:34]In the early stages of an El Nino, the ocean warms, but the atmosphere does not immediately respond. The coupling between the two systems is what locks the event in and prevents it from fading. That declining SOI combined with westerly wind anomalies observed in the western to east central equatorial Pacific over the past 30 days and enhanced convection along the equator near the date line all confirm that the ocean and atmosphere are now functioning as a coupled El Nino system. This is not a borderline signal. It is a clear confirmed and strengthening event. The implications for the fall and winter pattern across the United States are significant. But before I get there, I want to spend time on something I think is under reportported. What El Nino is doing to water infrastructure and agriculture right now in July before the pattern has even reached its peak. Let me start with water. The Colorado River Basin is the subject of long-unning legal and political negotiations between seven western states. The reason those negotiations exist is that the river is overallocated. More water has been promised to farms, cities, and industries than the river actually delivers in most years. Lake me and Lake Powell, the two largest reservoirs on the Colorado, serve as the buffer that absorbs the difference between allocation and delivery. After a brief recovery in 2023 when above average slowpack helped, both reservoirs have seen levels trend downward again under the influence of continued drought across the basin. The current El Nino pattern is not helping those reservoirs in summer. The mechanism that builds Colorado River water supply is winter and spring snowpack in the Rocky Mountains and particularly the Wasace front and Uinta mountains of Utah and the San Juan mountains of Colorado.

[00:12:27]That snowpack comes from storms that track across the region between November and April. During strong El Nino winters, those storms are more likely to track across California and the Southwest than to penetrate deeply into the Colorado Rockies.

[00:12:42]Some El Nino winters actually deliver below average snowpack to the upper Colorado River basin, even as they deliver above average precipitation to the lower basin and California.

[00:12:53]If the winter of 2026 through 2027 follows that pattern, which the analogs do not rule out, the reservoir recovery that water managers are hoping for could be delayed.

[00:13:05]This matters practically for cities like Las Vegas, Nevada, which draws the majority of its water supply from Lake Meade. It matters for Phoenix, Arizona, for Tucson, for the agricultural communities of the Imperial Valley in California, and for the ranches and farms across Utah and Colorado that depend on river flows for irrigation.

[00:13:26]The drought is not just a background atmospheric condition. It is a supply chain problem for food and water.

[00:13:34]Now, let me talk about agriculture more specifically because the El Nino pattern is affecting crops in ways that the drought monitor numbers alone do not fully capture. The winter wheat harvest across the southern plains, which primarily involves Kansas, Oklahoma, and parts of Colorado, and Texas, concluded in June and early July. The USDA crop progress reports showed condition downgrades in the zones that were in or adjacent to drought territory, particularly in western Kansas and southeastern Colorado.

[00:14:08]The good news for winter wheat is that the harvest is complete before the current heat dome event. The bad news is that soil moisture profiles going into the next winter wheat planting season, which begins in September and October across the southern plains, will be depleted.

[00:14:25]Corn is the story I am watching more carefully for August. Corn in the western corn belt, particularly in Nebraska, eastern Colorado, and western Kansas, was planted into soil conditions that were already below average for moisture in some areas. The critical pollination period for corn in the central plains typically falls in late July and early August. Prolonged temperatures above 90° during pollination stress the plant and reduce kernel set. If the current heat pattern extends into the first two weeks of August, which the model guidance suggests is possible for portions of Nebraska and Kansas, there is real risk of yield reduction in those states.

[00:15:05]Illinois, Iowa, and Indiana have had a more favorable moisture regime this summer, and corn conditions there have been better than in the western part of the belt. But the eastern cornbt is not immune to late season heat stress either. The extended outlook from the CPC for August 10th through 14th still shows above normal temperatures as the most likely outcome across much of the nation's midsection.

[00:15:28]Have you watched the grocery store prices over the past few years and wondered how much of that is weather?

[00:15:34]The answer is more than most people realize. A drought year in the corn and wheat belts does not show up immediately in the produce aisle. It shows up in the feed costs for livestock 6 months later and in the retail price of beef and pork 6 months after that. The compounding effect of multiple consecutive dry or heatstressed growing seasons is why agricultural economists track drought conditions as carefully as they track commodity futures. I want to walk through the longer range pattern for August and September now because this is where I think the information gap is largest for most viewers.

[00:16:10]The CPC's extended outlooks show above normal temperatures remaining locked into the Pacific Northwest, Northern Rockies, and Great Basin region through at least mid August.

[00:16:23]The pattern I described where El Nino keeps the storm track north and allows a persistent ridge over the west does not flip quickly. It takes a major pattern disruption to break down a ridge this well established in the models. Right now, neither the GFS nor the European is showing a significant breakdown through the first half of August. What that means for wildfire is straightforward.

[00:16:49]The National Inter Agency Coordination Cent's significant wildland fire potential outlook for August 2026 shows above normal fire potential across the Pacific Northwest and portions of the Northern Rockies. Above normal in that framework means a greater than usual likelihood of significant wildland fires. The fuel moisture content in those forests is depleted from the combined effects of below normal winter snowpack, the record July heat, and the absence of meaningful rainfall through most of June and July. When a dry thunderstorm passes through an area like this, lightning ignitions can go large quickly. And when a frontal passage brings gusty winds without meaningful precipitation, any active fire has the potential to make runs of tens of thousands of acres.

[00:17:38]The western fire season's connection to El Nino is direct and mechanistic.

[00:17:44]During strong El Nino events, the Pacific jetream is displaced northward and strengthened. In winter, this means storm tracks that would normally deliver precipitation to California and the Pacific Northwest are diverted.

[00:17:58]Less snow falls on the Cascades, the Sierra Nevada, and the Northern Rockies.

[00:18:04]Snowpack runs below average. When summer arrives and temperatures rise, rivers and streams that are normally fed by snow melt run lower. Soil moisture is depleted earlier in the season.

[00:18:15]Vegetation cures and turns into fire fuel weeks ahead of schedule. Then a heat dome arrives and accelerates the process further. That is the chain of events that ran from last winter's below average snowpack in parts of the Pacific Northwest directly to the fire conditions visible in satellite imagery across the northern Rockies right now in late July 2026.

[00:18:39]The power grid situation is another dimension of this that I do not think gets enough coverage in weather content.

[00:18:45]The Federal Energy Regulatory Commission released its summer energy market and electric reliability assessment on May 21st. That report identified above normal summer temperatures as the dominant operational concern and warned that geographically widespread high temperatures can intensify stress on the electric grid by reducing the ability of neighboring systems to exchange supply while they are simultaneously facing high demand.

[00:19:13]NERC, the North American Electric Reliability Corporation, issued similar warnings earlier this year, flagging that the grid is running leaner than it has in years and that demand is outpacing supply in critical regions.

[00:19:28]What that means practically is that when Montana hits record temperatures at the same time Utah is hitting record temperatures at the same time Phoenix is sustaining tripledigit heat for weeks at a time. The transfer capacity between regional grids is reduced exactly when it is most needed.

[00:19:48]The PJM interconnection, which serves 65 million people across 13 eastern states, came close to its operating margins during the July 4th heat dome event.

[00:19:59]That eastern event was linked to at least 44 deaths and pushed power demand across the northeastern United States into territory that system operators had not planned for in their summer capacity assessments. There is an additional wrinkle specifically relevant to the western heat event that is ongoing right now. Solar power now represents a meaningful portion of the generation mix in California, Arizona, Nevada, and increasingly across the mountain west.

[00:20:27]During extreme heat events, the efficiency of solar photovoltaic panels drops by 12 to 20%. The panels are designed to operate optimally at around 25°.

[00:20:39]When ambient temperatures push above 40° C, which has been happening repeatedly across the Southwest this summer, the efficiency loss is real and measurable.

[00:20:48]This means that on the highest demand days, when air conditioning load peaks across the region, the solar generation that is supposed to help meet that demand is operating at reduced capacity.

[00:20:59]The grid has to draw on other sources to compensate and those sources have their own limits. I want to shift now to what is happening in the Atlantic tropics because I know a lot of viewers are tracking the hurricane season and the quiet start to June and July warrants a full explanation. Colorado State University has revised its 2026 Atlantic hurricane season outlook downward three times. The original April forecast called for 13 named storms and six hurricanes. The June revision dropped it to 11 named storms and five hurricanes.

[00:21:30]The most recent mid July update now calls for just nine named storms, four hurricanes, and only one major hurricane. CSU specifically noted that they anticipate this year's windshare in the tropical Atlantic will be the second highest since 1981, trailing only the 2015 Super El Nino season. If that forecast verifies, this would be one of the quietest Atlantic hurricane seasons in more than a decade. The mechanism behind this suppression is direct. When the equatorial Pacific warms dramatically, an atmospheric bridge forms, sinking air over the tropical Atlantic and the main development region increases upper level westerly winds.

[00:22:12]Those winds, which meteorologists call vertical wind shear, tear developing tropical systems apart before they can organize into coherent vortices. The ECMWF forecast for August through October shows a substantial anomaly of this type of wind shear over the entire MDR, the band of ocean from the lesser antillies west of Africa to the Yucatan Peninsula where the majority of Atlantic hurricanes form during peak season. The signal is consistent across model runs and backed by strong historical analogs from previous strong El Nino events.

[00:22:46]There is one caveat I always raise because it is scientifically important.

[00:22:51]Wind shear suppresses probability. It does not eliminate it. The 2015 super El Nino season produced Hurricane Hain, which reached category 4. Even in the most El Nino suppressed seasons in the historical record, storms still formed.

[00:23:07]The area I am watching most carefully is the Western Atlantic, the Caribbean, and the Gulf waters, where sea surface temperatures are running 1 to2° above the long-term climatological average. If a brief relaxation in the El Nino shear occurs during August through October, which can happen even in strong El Nino years, any developing system would find warm fuel available in those waters. I am not forecasting a hurricane, but I'm tracking this asymmetry in the sheer field as the season moves toward its statistical peak. The atmosphere is also currently being influenced by another factor that is easy to underestimate.

[00:23:44]The North Atlantic sea surface temperatures are running above average in areas west of the MDR, which means the overall moisture content and convective potential of the tropical Atlantic is not zero. The total available ocean heat content in the western Atlantic basin is still meaningful. El Nino is suppressing the organized formation of storms. The underlying ocean warmth is sitting beneath that suppression, ready to release energy if the atmospheric conditions shift.

[00:24:16]Now, let me take you into the bigger picture, the global context of what is happening in the Pacific right now, and why it matters beyond any single hurricane season or any single summer drought.

[00:24:28]The World Meteorological Organization published a prediction update in May 2026, projecting an 86% chance that at least one year between 2026 and 2030 will surpass 2024 as the warmest year on record globally. The report synthesized forecasts from 13 different institutes.

[00:24:49]The lead author, Dr. Leon Hermanson of the UK Met Office specifically stated that the El Nino predicted for the end of 2026 increases the chances of 2027 being the next record-breaking year globally. The January through June global surface temperature anomaly in 2026 was the third highest in the 177year instrumental record at plus 1.14° C above the long-term average.

[00:25:17]Only 2024 and 2025 were warmer over the same January through June period in that entire record. And the top three warmest years ever recorded globally are 2023, 2024, and 2025 in that order. This is not statistical noise. It is a directional signal. Noah is now virtually certain that 2026 will rank among the 10 warmest years ever recorded and very likely within the top five.

[00:25:47]Climate scientist Zeke Housefather writing this week noted that because global temperature lags ENSO by around 3 to 5 months, most of this El Nino's warming contribution will land in 2027, which he described as shaping up to be a genuinely alarming year. His dashboard gives 2026 a meaningful chance of edging out 2024 as the warmest year on record and projects 2027 as likely to break the record by a sizable margin. This matters for understanding what you are seeing in the summer of 2026 because it places the current heat records in Montana and Utah in their proper context.

[00:26:25]The all-time record of 115° at Miles City on July 12th, did not happen in a vacuum. It happened during a strong El Nino event, which is itself occurring on top of a global baseline that is already 1.3 to 1.5° C warmer than pre-industrial levels.

[00:26:45]The El Nino pattern and the background warming trend are compounding simultaneously.

[00:26:50]The records that are falling this summer would not necessarily have fallen under an identical atmospheric circulation pattern 30 or 40 years ago because the starting temperature of the air mass was lower then. Let me be clear about what I am not saying. I am not claiming that every record that falls this summer is caused by human-driven climate change alone. El Nino is a natural cycle. Heat domes form during natural atmospheric patterns. But the margin by which records are being broken, the fact that Miles City topped its previous all-time record by more than 2° on a single afternoon, that margin is where the background warming signal shows up. The physics are not controversial. Warmer air holds more energy. Higher baseline temperatures push extreme events further into record territory.

[00:27:43]Now, let me walk through the long range scenario for the fall and winter because I think this is the most under reportported part of what the current El Nino development means.

[00:27:54]What does a very strong to super El Nino peaking in October through December 2026 mean for the contiguous United States?

[00:28:04]For California, Oregon, and Washington, the western precipitation pattern under a strong El Nino winter is complex and geographically split. California and the Southwest typically receive above average precipitation driven by enhanced atmospheric rivers that carry enormous moisture loads from the warm Pacific.

[00:28:23]The 1997 through98 event produced multi-billion dollar flooding across California. The 2015 through 2016 event did similar damage. The same mountains that are currently depleted of snowpack from the current dry spell could receive heavy snow and rain in the coming winter. And the rapid transition from drought conditions to saturated soils dramatically increases the risk of debris flows and flooding in areas that burned during the 2026 wildfire season.

[00:28:52]Fire scars have little vegetation to hold soil in place. A powerful atmospheric river into a burned landscape produces mudslides.

[00:29:01]For the Pacific Northwest, the El Nino winter pattern tends to be warmer and drier relative to average across Oregon, Washington, Idaho, and Montana. The same belt that is running hot and dry right now could see another winter with below average snowpack. If the winter of 2026 through 2027 is as warm and dry in the Northwest as El Nino analogs suggest, the drought recovery through spring 2027 is at risk. The Colorado River Basin water managers who are hoping for a reservoir recovery this winter may be disappointed by the atmospheric pattern even if California itself sees heavy precipitation.

[00:29:41]For the southern tier, Texas, Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama, and the Carolas, a strong El Nino winter typically delivers wetter than normal conditions. The subtropical jet pumps repeated storm systems across the southern states from November through March. Flooding risk in the lower Mississippi Valley, in Tennessee, and in northern Alabama increases substantially. ACE's summer forecast specifically flag the Texas Hill Country as a zone that deserves careful attention given the 2025 disaster history in that drainage basin.

[00:30:14]The combination of El Nino's tendency toward enhanced southern tier precipitation and the existing vulnerability of communities in that area is a risk factor worth following as we move into fall. The Ohio Valley, Kentucky, Indiana, Ohio tends to fall in a transition zone between the warm, dry signal of the upper Midwest and the wet signal of the Deep South. Winter precipitation there is more variable during El Nino events, making the forecast for that region less certain than for the Southwest or the Deep South. And for the northern tier, Minnesota, Wisconsin, Michigan, the Dakotas, Montana, and the Cornbelt, El Nino winters tend to be warmer than average. The jetream rides north. Storms track away from the region, and the coldest air stays bottled up in Canada.

[00:31:06]This is often described as a mild winter signal. Whether that means drought relief or not depends heavily on whether spring 2027 delivers normal or above normal precipitation to rebuild soil moisture in areas that are going into the cold season already depleted.

[00:31:23]I want to be transparent about model uncertainty at these long ranges.

[00:31:28]Everything I have described for the fall and winter pattern is based on probability and analog composites from previous strong Elino events. El Nino events are not perfectly consistent in their downstream effects. The 1997 through98 event produced certain outcomes in California that the 2015 through 16 event partially replicated but with meaningful differences in timing and intensity.

[00:31:56]The current event if it reaches super elino strength would be one of the strongest in the instrumental record and the models have limited historical data for events at that intensity level. I think it is responsible to say that when scientists describe forecasts for events of unprecedented or near unprecedented strength, there is additional uncertainty in the tales of the distribution. What the model consensus does support clearly and what I am highly confident in based on the current data is that the summer pattern of western heat and drought, fire danger across the Pacific Northwest and Rockies, Gulf Coast moisture and flood risk in the southern tier, and Atlantic hurricane suppression from El Nino windshare. All of that is the established signal for July and August.

[00:32:40]The long range fall and winter projections carry more uncertainty, but the directional signals are consistent enough across the GFS, the European, and the CFSV2 to warrant serious attention.

[00:32:53]The drought monitor as of July 14th shows 38.9% of the entire United States and Puerto Rico in drought. The lower 48 figure is 46.5%.

[00:33:05]As recently as late June, the lower 48 percentage was above 52%. So there has been some improvement in the southeast and southern plains driven by episodic rainfall. But the west is a completely different story. The northwestern states, the Rockies, and portions of the central plains held steady or worsened.

[00:33:24]Parts of central and north central Colorado and northwest South Dakota degraded during the most recent reporting week, even as conditions improved in the southeast. This east-west divergence in drought conditions is a fingerprint of the El Nino pattern and is almost certainly going to persist for weeks, if not months. The monsoon will provide some relief to the southwest, the Arizona deserts and the Rio Grande corridor of New Mexico are already seeing increased convective activity as the North American monsoon strengthens. But the monsoon does not reach the Pacific Northwest. It does not reach Montana or Idaho or Utah's canyon country to any meaningful degree.

[00:34:03]The regions where the drought is most severe are largely outside the monsoon's influence.

[00:34:09]There is one more dimension to the western drought that I want to address before we close and that is the hydroelectric power generation story because this is directly relevant to the power grid stress I mentioned earlier and it is not widely discussed.

[00:34:24]The Pacific Northwest, particularly Washington and Oregon, relies heavily on hydroelectric generation. The Columbia River system and its tributaries are the backbone of the regional grid. Dams like Bonavville, Grand Kulie, and John Day generate power year round, but their output is highest in late spring and early summer when snow melt maximizes river flows. During drought years with below average snowpack, summer river flows are reduced. Reduced river flows mean reduced hydroelectric generation capacity precisely during the months when air conditioning demand is driving electricity consumption to its peak.

[00:35:04]That is the same dynamic that amplifies grid stress under El Nino. Less hydro capacity available on the supply side, more cooling demand on the consumption side. At exactly the same moment, the Bonavville Power Administration has flagged water supply concerns for the Colombia River system this summer. The combination of reduced snowpack from the 2025 through 2026 winter and the early season heat that accelerated snow melt timing has left reservoir storage in parts of the Colombia system the low where managers would prefer heading into the peak demand months. If the western ridge holds into August and reduces any potential for late season precipitation, that storage will continue to be drawn down. Now, let me give you the precise summary of what I am watching most closely heading into the next several weeks because I want to be concrete about what to expect from this channel as this story continues to develop.

[00:36:04]First, the weekly Mino 3.4 index updates. I track these numbers every week. The current reading of plus 2.1 from July 15th is already at levels where the strongest historical events were sitting in their development stage.

[00:36:22]If this number climbs above plus 2.5 by August or September, it is a strong signal that the event is tracking toward super El Nino intensity.

[00:36:34]If it stalls or begins to decline, that would be scientifically significant and I would cover it immediately.

[00:36:42]Second, the CPC August ENSO diagnostic discussion.

[00:36:48]The Climate Prediction Center releases its monthly ENSO assessment on the second Thursday of each month. The August release will give us updated probability figures for El Nino strength categories through winter. Given the trajectory of the data through July, I would expect that release to either maintain or increase the probability assigned to very strong El Nino conditions.

[00:37:12]Third, the drought monitor updates which release every Thursday. The monsoon boundary is currently the most important variable for the southwest drought.

[00:37:22]Acqueeather's Chad Merrill noted that improvements from recent rainfall in southeast Texas will likely fill back in with short-term drought as high pressure rebuilds across the south. I want to see whether the Arizona monsoon delivers sustained improvements or whether those improvements are episodic and short-lived as they often are in active monsoon seasons. Fourth, the main development region in the Atlantic from mid August onward. The window I'm watching most carefully is when El Nino's shear signal might briefly relax as part of the natural intraseasonal variability that occurs even during strong El Nino events. If a Madden Julian oscillation signal suppresses convection in the eastern Pacific temporarily, it can reduce El Nino's grip on Atlantic shear for a week or two. That is a window when Atlantic development becomes more possible. I will flag it clearly when I see it in the data. and fifth, the CFSV2 and European seasonal guidance for the October through December Nino 3.4 forecast.

[00:38:26]The model agreement right now is exceptional, but models do revise. If there is any degradation in the signal pointing towards super El Nino, I will report it as quickly as I report reinforcement of that signal. Now, I want to spend time on something that I rarely see covered in weather content, even though it is directly relevant to the current pattern. That is what El Nino does to the human body and specifically to the most vulnerable populations in affected regions.

[00:38:55]Heat stress is not a linear experience.

[00:38:58]The human body regulates its core temperature through sweating and through the radiation of heat from the skin surface to the surrounding air. When air temperatures rise above about 35° C, the body can no longer efficiently radiate heat outward. When humidity rises high enough, sweat cannot evaporate effectively and the cooling mechanism breaks down further. The combination of temperature and humidity is why meteorologists use the heat index to communicate risk rather than temperature alone. But there is a threshold that is increasingly discussed in the medical and climate science communities and it is called the wet bulb temperature. A wet bulb temperature at or above 35° C represents a condition where no amount of sweating can cool a healthy adult enough to maintain safe core temperature regardless of activity level. Even lying completely still in the shade, a person would overheat and eventually die without external cooling. Wet bulb temperatures at those levels have historically been rare. They are becoming less rare as both background temperatures and El Nino events push heat and humidity to new levels.

[00:40:05]During the July heat dome across the western United States, the dry desert conditions kept wet bulb temperatures below the most dangerous thresholds, even as dry bulb temperatures shattered records.

[00:40:17]Mile City at 115° F with low humidity is actually physiologically safer than Houston at 97° with a due point of 80°.

[00:40:27]The Gulf Coast heat that often feels oppressive to people in the southeast is actually more physiologically dangerous per degree of air temperature than the dry western heat specifically because the high humidity eliminates the body's primary cooling pathway. This matters for understanding who is most at risk in the current pattern. In the western heat dome, the highest risk populations are outdoor workers who cannot choose to stay in the shade. elderly individuals living in older housing stock without air conditioning and people in communities that lack the economic resources to run air conditioning continuously during a multi-week heat event. Phoenix and Las Vegas have robust infrastructure for extreme heat.

[00:41:09]Billings, Montana and Sheridan, Wyoming are less accustomed to sustained weeks of tripledigit temperatures and have historically had less cooling infrastructure per capita. The July Eastern Heat Dome, which peaked around the 4th of July holiday and was linked to at least 44 deaths across the northeastern United States, exposed a different infrastructure gap. The Northeast from Washington DC through Boston was not built for sustained 104° afternoons.

[00:41:38]Many older urban housing units lack central air conditioning. Subway systems and bus networks that millions of people depend on became dangerous to operate during extreme heat. The PJM interconnection, the grid serving 65 million people in that region, came close to operational limits. Emergency management systems designed for one heat event per summer, were managing what is becoming a bi-weekly cycle. And that phrase, a bi-weekly cycle of extreme heat events, is one that I think should reframe how people think about what they are experiencing.

[00:42:15]This is not a bad summer. It is not an unusually hot year that will be followed by a return to normal. The 2026 summer pattern, amplified by El Nino on top of background warming, represents what the distribution of summer temperatures is shifting toward. The events that felt extreme in 2023 are becoming the baseline. The events that feel record- setting today will be revisited and matched in the future.

[00:42:43]I want to be very clear that I am not saying this to produce despair. I am saying it because people who understand the actual trajectory of the pattern make better decisions than people who treat each extreme event as a surprising anomaly. Let me now spend some time on what happens globally when a strong El Nino develops because the United States is not the only country affected.

[00:43:06]The 1997 through98 El Nino is remembered in the United States primarily for flooding in California and a suppressed Atlantic hurricane season, but globally that event produced some of the most significant simultaneous humanitarian disasters in recorded history.

[00:43:24]Indonesia and Papua New Guinea experienced catastrophic droughts and wildfires. Australia's eastern coast entered severe drought. India received below average monsoon rainfall in affected years, placing hundreds of millions of people under food and water stress. Brazil's northeastern region, the Satau, experienced devastating drought that displaced farming communities. The total economic damage from that single El Nino event aggregated globally was estimated in the tens of billions of dollars and that calculation does not fully account for the mortality and displacement in developing countries where data collection was less complete.

[00:44:08]The current developing event is drawing comparisons to that 1997 benchmark and to the 2015 through 16 event. If it reaches super El Nino intensity, meaning Nino 3.4 anomalies above plus2° at peak, the downstream global effects will be significant. Australia's eastern states are already tracking the developing event closely as El Nino typically reduces rainfall across eastern and southeastern Australia during the development and peak phases. The Australian Bureau of Meteorology has flagged elevated risk of below average winter and spring rainfall in those regions.

[00:44:49]Southeast Asian rice production, which involves hundreds of millions of farmers across Thailand, Vietnam, the Philippines, and Indonesia, is sensitive to El Ninovenriven changes in monsoon timing and intensity.

[00:45:03]The reason I raised the global picture in a video focused on the United States is that the global food system is interconnected.

[00:45:11]Drought in India's wheat belt or flooding in Argentina's soy producing pampas does not stay neatly contained within those national borders. It shows up in global commodity prices. It shows up in shipping costs and logistics and eventually it shows up in grocery prices for American consumers. The El Nino that is currently developing in the Pacific is not just a United States weather story. It is a global economic and food system stress test that is beginning to run right now in July 2026.

[00:45:43]There is also a striking historical parallel worth knowing. The El Nino of 1877 through 1878, which researchers have estimated was one of the most powerful events in the instrumental record, produced global famines that historians have documented as some of the deadliest weatherdriven humanitarian disasters in modern history. Tens of millions of people died from starvation and disease in India, China, Brazil, and other affected regions during that event. I am not drawing a direct parallel to 2026. The global food system is more resilient today than it was in 1877, and international disaster response mechanisms are more developed. But the scale of what a super El Nino event can do to global food and water systems, historically documented, is something that deserves to be part of the public understanding of why events like this one matter beyond individual temperature records.

[00:46:41]Now, let me address a question that I know some viewers are already thinking about. What happens when El Nino ends?

[00:46:49]El Nino events typically last 12 to 18 months from onset to neutral and often transition toward lanino the cool phase as the warm water anomaly is exhausted and trade winds reestablish.

[00:47:03]If this event follows the trajectory of the 1997-98 and 2015-16 analoges, it would peak in late 2026 or very early 2027 and then begin to weaken through 2027, potentially transitioning to neutral or lenino conditions by late 2027 or 2028.

[00:47:25]What that transition would mean for the United States is a pattern shift in the opposite direction from what I have been describing.

[00:47:32]Leninino winters tend to be colder and wetter in the Pacific Northwest, potentially helping to rebuild snowpack in the northern Rockies and Cascades.

[00:47:42]They tend to be drier in California and the Southwest, which counterintuitively could leave California in drought again despite the potentially heavy El Nino precipitation during the upcoming winter. Lenino events are also associated with an increase in Atlantic hurricane activity as the shear that El Nino is currently imposing over the tropics relaxes and in some cases reverses to below average shear.

[00:48:07]The 2020 Atlantic hurricane season, which was one of the most active in history, occurred during a Lenino event.

[00:48:15]The transition from the current El Nino suppression of hurricane activity to a lenino enhancement of it is something I will be watching very carefully in 2027 and 2028.

[00:48:28]But that is the future. Right now in July 2026, the signal is clear and the current pattern is El Nino driven.

[00:48:38]Let me make sure I have been concrete about what specific populations and regions should be doing with this information right now. If you are in Phoenix, Tucson, Las Vegas, or any other southwestern city dealing with the current heat, the National Weather Services heat risk tool is showing its highest alert levels across the West.

[00:48:58]The risk is not just peak afternoon temperatures. Overnight temperatures remaining in the upper 80s and 90s prevent the body from recovering from daytime heat stress. If you live in a neighborhood without reliable air conditioning, identify the cooling centers that your city has opened. Drink water before you feel thirsty and check on elderly neighbors who may not have the same awareness of how quickly heat stress can become a medical emergency.

[00:49:26]If you are in the Pacific Northwest in Oregon or Washington or northern Idaho and you are tracking wildfires, sign up for your county's emergency alert system if you have not already.

[00:49:38]Wildfire spread in low humidity, high wind conditions can cover ground faster than people in its path expect. The combination of depleted fuels from the drought, active fire conditions from the heat, and gusty winds during frontal passages creates the most dangerous fire weather scenarios.

[00:49:56]Know your evacuation routes before you need them. If you're in the Gulf Coast states or the deep south, dealing with the episodic heavy rainfall, the flash flooding risk is concentrated in areas where the soil is already saturated from previous rain events and where drainage infrastructure is at capacity. Do not drive through flooded roadways. Turn around. The leading cause of weather related fatalities in the United States is not tornadoes. It is flood related drownings. And a significant percentage of those occur when people drive vehicles into water of unknown depth. If you are in the Midwest or Great Plains in an area that has been dealing with severe weather, the active convective pattern this summer is related to the same El Nino driven circulation changes I have been describing throughout this video. The jetream position and the moisture flow pattern are producing an active severe weather corridor across the central plains and the Midwest that is consistent with the El Nino summer teleconnection.

[00:50:58]I will continue covering severe weather events as they develop, but I want to make sure you understand why the pattern this summer has been as active as it has. And if you are in the northeastern United States in the cities that experienced the July 4th heat dome event, the infrastructure exposure that was revealed during that event deserves serious attention from city planners and emergency managers.

[00:51:23]The PJM grid came close to its limits.

[00:51:27]Cooling centers were overwhelmed in some cities. The urban heat island effect, which adds an additional 3 to 7° of warming to densely built city centers compared to surrounding suburban and rural areas, means that extreme heat affects urban residents more severely than regional temperature averages suggest. That gap is not going to close on its own. The background temperature is rising and El Nino events are intensifying it further. I want to take a moment to recognize something that I think is important to say explicitly.

[00:52:00]Weather forecasting and climate science have made extraordinary advances in the past several decades. The ability to track the Nino 3.4 index weekly to run ensembles of 26 models simultaneously to issue 6 to 10day forecasts for precipitation anomalies with meaningful skill. These are not small achievements.

[00:52:22]They represent generations of scientific work that give people in the path of extreme weather meaningful warning time that simply did not exist 50 years ago.

[00:52:32]When I track these numbers every week and bring them to you, I am drawing on that infrastructure of science and data collection. The NAA boy network in the tropical Pacific, the weather balloon launches that the National Weather Service conducts twice daily at dozens of sites across the country. the GEOS satellite data that NASA uses to produce those temperature maps that showed exactly where the 115 degree heat was on July 12th. The drought monitor, which synthesizes more than 40 different data indicators into a weekly map that tells farmers and water managers and emergency planners where moisture deficits are most severe. All of that goes into the picture I am describing in this video.

[00:53:17]And when I say the ocean is telling us something, I mean literally that the boys are transmitting data. The satellites are observing. The models are assimilating. And the picture that emerges from all of that observation and analysis is the one I have been walking you through today. Now I want to spend some time on a question that comes up frequently when I discuss El Nino. Why does the same ocean pattern produce such different effects on different parts of the United States simultaneously?

[00:53:47]The answer is rooted in the physics of the jetream and how it transmits energy from the tropics to the mid latitudes.

[00:53:54]The jetream is a fastmoving river of air in the upper troposphere, typically between 6 mi and 7 mi above the surface.

[00:54:01]It flows west to east across North America at speeds that can exceed 200 mph in its core. The position and strength of the jetream determine where storm systems develop, where they track, and where they deliver their moisture.

[00:54:14]During a neutral or laminino year, the jetream tends to take a more northerly position across the Pacific and then dives southward over the central United States, creating a pattern that funnels storms into the Great Plains and the Midwest.

[00:54:29]That pattern is why Kansas and Oklahoma and Nebraska are in the heart of Tornado Alley. The collision of cold air diving south along the jet and warm, moist air flowing north from the Gulf waters is exactly what creates the severe weather setups that define spring across the central United States.

[00:54:50]During an El Nino year, the jetream is enhanced and pushed southward across the Pacific. Instead of diving into the central United States, it tends to ride more directly into California and the southwest, carrying Pacific storms along a more southerntherly track. That is why California tends to get wetter during strong El Nino winters. But the flip side is that the northern tier from the Pacific Northwest through the northern Rockies and across the upper Midwest is starved of those Pacific storm systems.

[00:55:21]They track farther south. The northern states end up drier and warmer than average. The subtropical jet, which runs across the southern tier of the United States and into the Gulf Coast and Southeast, is actually enhanced during El Nino. This is a different branch of the jetream than the polar jet that determines most mid- latatitude storm tracks. And its enhancement during El Nino events is what drives the wetter than normal signal across Texas, Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama, and the southeast.

[00:55:51]The subtropical jet pumps moisture and instability from the tropics into the southern states repeatedly. So when I say El Nino produces a pattern split, what I mean mechanically is that it repositions these two branches of the jetream simultaneously. The polar jet shifts south over the Pacific but does not penetrate the northern United States. The subtropical jet strengthens and delivers active weather to the south. The middle of the country, the northern plains and upper Midwest, ends up in a zone that is relatively starved of both winter storms and summer moisture. The far west either gets hammered by amplified Pacific storms in winter, as California often does in strong El Nino winters, or gets cut off from them entirely, as the Pacific Northwest tends to be. All of this is happening simultaneously right now in July 2026. And the current drought map is the clearest possible visual expression of that jetream geometry.

[00:56:49]Let me also spend time on the science of the underwater heat that is driving this event because I think most people do not have a clear mental picture of what the subsurface ocean looks like and why it matters. The Nino 3.4 4 sea surface temperature anomaly that I have been citing throughout this video measures the temperature at the ocean surface in a specific box of the equatorial Pacific. But El Nino does not begin at the surface. It begins below it. What researchers call the subsurface heat content is measured by looking at the depth of the 20° C is which is the depth at which ocean water reaches 20°.

[00:57:30]In a normal year, that depth is relatively shallow in the eastern equatorial Pacific. During a developing El Nino, a pulse of warm water called a Kelvin wave propagates eastward below the surface from the western Pacific towards South America. When that warm subsurface water reaches the eastern Pacific and upwells to the surface, it raises the Nino 3.4 index and feeds the El Nino signal. The reason I am explaining this in detail is that the subsurface heat content tells you something about how much energy the event has available going forward.

[00:58:05]Climate scientist Daniel Swain flagged this earlier in 2026 as a key signal reinforcing the developing event. The Kelvin waves that propagated eastward during late 2025 and early 2026 brought a substantial load of warm water into position in the equatorial Pacific. That warm water does not disappear quickly.

[00:58:26]It feeds the surface signal for months.

[00:58:29]And as the June 20th Capernicus Marine Service Bulletin confirmed, the world's sea surface set a record for that time of year at 21° C, beating 2023 and 2024.

[00:58:42]The tank is full and it is warming the system from below.

[00:58:47]This is different from a surface warming event that might be driven by short-term atmospheric conditions and could reverse quickly. The subsurface structure supporting the current El Nino is deep and well established. The IRI models which include both dynamical and statistical approaches and which are weighted equally in the CCSR probability forecast all show this event maintaining El Nino conditions through the forecast period. There is no reversal mechanism visible in the data.

[00:59:16]I also want to spend time on the question of model uncertainty and what I do when models disagree because I think viewers deserve transparency about how forecasting works. The current El Nino trajectory has exceptional model agreement. 23 of 26 IRI ensemble members forecasting very strong conditions is a high confidence signal. But this is not always the case. And I want to be honest about the limits of long range forecasting so that you understand both why I cite specific probabilities and why those probabilities are not certainties. Climate models have been verified against historical data through a process called hindcasting where the model is run with historical initial conditions and its output is compared to what actually happened. The skill of current ENSO forecasting models at the 6 to 12 month range has improved dramatically in the past several decades. primarily because of improvements in ocean observing systems, better representation of ocean atmosphere coupling in the models and better initialization with observational data from the Argo float network, the boy arrays in the tropical Pacific and satellite sea surface temperature measurements.

[01:00:28]But skill degrades at longer ranges and there is a phenomenon called the spring predictability barrier which is a wellocumented feature of enznamics.

[01:00:38]Forecasts made before May for the following fall and winter tend to have lower skill than forecasts made after June because the spring transition from leninho or neutral conditions involves a chaotic period where small differences in initial conditions can produce large differences in outcome.

[01:00:56]The current forecast for El Nino peaking in late 2026 and into 2027 was made after we have crossed that spring barrier which actually increases our confidence in the forecast skill compared to what would have been available in February or March.

[01:01:13]What the GFS and the European model do at extended range is different from what the seasonal ensemble models do. The operational GFS and European are best at 6 to 15 days. Beyond that, they are providing probabilistic guidance, not deterministic forecasts. When I say the GFS shows a signal for ridge rebuilding in the southwest by late July, I'm interpreting probabilistic guidance at the edge of its reliable range. When I site the CFSV2 for August temperature outlooks, I'm using a different tool designed for monthly and seasonal scale guidance.

[01:01:51]Each model has its appropriate domain and I try to use the right tool for the right time scale. The drought monitor, which I cited extensively in this video, is not a model at all. It is a weekly synthesis of dozens of observational data sets, including the Palmer drought severity index, the standardized precipitation index, stream flow measurements, soil moisture observations, and reports from over 350 drought observers across the country.

[01:02:21]When the drought monitor shows 46.5% of the lower 48 in drought, that is an empirically grounded measurement of current conditions, not a forecast. It is the most reliable data product I site precisely because it is observationbased rather than model based. I want to spend a moment talking about what the natural gas market is doing in response to the current heat because it is a concrete and immediate way to see El Nino's economic fingerprint.

[01:02:49]Cooling degree days, which is the industry standard measure of air conditioning demand, are running well above the historical average for July 2026 across the United States. The Energy Information Administration projected roughly 1610 cooling degree days nationally for the full summer season. When actual temperatures run above forecast at multiple major population centers simultaneously, as they have during the heat dome events of late June and July, the real-time demand for natural gas and electricity to power cooling systems spikes sharply.

[01:03:23]Oot, the Texas grid operator, has been managing record demand levels through July. The grid operators in the western United States serving Arizona, Nevada, and California, have also been operating in elevated demand territory. The Federal Energy Regulatory Commission specifically noted in its summer assessment that ERCOT, the PJM interconnection, and the SERC Reliability Corporation, which serves the southeastern United States, all face price increases of 11%, 5%, and 5% respectively compared to the previous year. Those increases are being driven primarily by the combination of growing cooling load from population expansion in heatprone states and the direct impact of El Nino driven above normal temperatures on electricity demand for individual households. This shows up in electric bills. The EIA projected national average household electricity bills for June through August at levels above recent summer averages driven by this same combination of heat and El Nino influence on the temperature pattern. If you have seen your electric bill jump this July compared to July of 2024, the El Nino pattern is part of the reason. There is a second order effect that I find scientifically interesting and practically relevant. During the heat dome events of late June and July, the grid operators managing the western interconnection were also managing a reduction in hydroelect electric output from the Colombia River system. As I mentioned earlier, reduced hydrogeneration during peak demand is exactly the wrong combination and it forced those operators to rely more heavily on natural gas and where available on imports from neighboring regions. But when multiple regions are simultaneously experiencing above normal demand, as has happened repeatedly this summer, the ability to import electricity across regional boundaries is constrained.

[01:05:24]Each region is drawing on every available source internally. This is the structural challenge that the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission described as geographically widespread high temperatures reducing the ability of neighboring systems to exchange supply while they are simultaneously facing high demand. It is not a hypothetical concern. It is what happened during the 4th of July heat dome event in the east and what is happening again during the current western heat event. Now let me bring all of this together for you. The El Nino that is currently strengthening in the tropical Pacific is not just a weather pattern. It is a system level stress test for American infrastructure, agriculture, water management, and public health. The summer signature is already visible and measurable. The winter signature is projected to be larger and more geographically widespread. The global implications extend to food production, water availability, and economic stability in multiple countries simultaneously. What the data is telling us today is that this event has not peaked. The Nino 3.4 anomaly at plus 2.1° in mid July is already in the range where historical super Elnino events were sitting in their development stage. The atmospheric coupling is confirmed.

[01:06:47]The subsurface heat content is deep and well established.

[01:06:52]The model ensemble agreement is exceptional.

[01:06:56]Every indicator points toward further strengthening through fall with peak intensity likely in the October through January window. There is one more piece of this story that I want to address before I close because I think it answers a question that is fair to ask.

[01:07:13]If El Nino suppresses Atlantic hurricane activity so strongly, should people in hurricane prone states actually relax their preparation?

[01:07:22]The answer is no. And here is why I want to be very clear about that. The historical record shows that suppressed hurricane seasons still produce storms.

[01:07:33]The 2015 Atlantic season was suppressed by the strongest El Nino in modern history at the time, and Hurricane Hain developed into a category 4 storm.

[01:07:43]The 1997 season during that year's super El Nino still produced multiple name storms and at least one hurricane landfall. What El Nino does is shift the probability distribution downward. It does not empty the distribution and there is a specific factor that makes this year's quiet baseline somewhat deceptive. The sea surface temperatures in the western Caribbean and the northeastern Gulf waters are above average right now. That warmth is not being overcome by El Nino shear in those specific areas. The shear signal from El Nino is strongest in the deep tropics in the main development region extending from west of Africa to the Yucatan. The western Atlantic basin closer to the United States coastline has less shear.

[01:08:27]So if a storm were to form in the western Caribbean or the Gulf waters, which is not the typical genesis location for major hurricanes, but has happened in notable events like Hurricane Alicia in 1983 or tropical storm Arthur earlier this season, the favorable water temperatures would be there to support it. Colorado State University's latest forecast of one major hurricane for the full 2026 season is a probabilistic statement. It reflects the expected outcome given current El Nino conditions. One is not zero. And preparing for that one is exactly the right approach. If you live in a hurricane prone area from the Texas Gulf Coast through Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama, Florida, Georgia, the Carolas, and up through Virginia, and the Chesapeake Bay region, maintain your hurricane kit. Know your evacuation zone. Know whether your flood insurance is current. The Atlantic season peaks statistically in midepptember. We are still more than 7 weeks away from that peak. El Nino does not erase peak season. It makes peak season quieter on average, not irrelevant.

[01:09:37]I also want to spend a moment on what the current El Nino conditions mean for the Eastern Pacific hurricane season because it is almost exactly the inverse of the Atlantic situation. El Nino reduces shear in the eastern Pacific while increasing it in the Atlantic.

[01:09:55]The Eastern Pacific hurricane season has been more active than average this year, which is consistent with the El Nino signal.

[01:10:03]Systems forming off the coast of Central America and Mexico have had a more favorable atmospheric environment than they would in a lenino or neutral year.

[01:10:13]If you are in western Mexico in states like Haliscoco, Naarit or Sinaloa or in the Baja California Peninsula, the elevated eastern Pacific activity deserves your attention through fall.

[01:10:26]I'm going to say something now that I want to be direct about because I think weather communication sometimes avoids this kind of clarity.

[01:10:35]The current El Nino event, if it follows the trajectory the models are projecting, is going to be one of the defining weather and climate events of this decade for the United States.

[01:10:47]The summer signature is already visible in drought expansion, heat records, wildfire danger, and Atlantic hurricane suppression.

[01:10:56]The winter signature, which arrives with more intensity than the summer signature in historical analoges, is going to affect precipitation distribution, flood risk, snowpack, and agricultural planning from California to the Ohio Valley.

[01:11:12]The total footprint of a strong to super El Nino winter is enormous and it follows a summer that has already stressed infrastructure, agriculture and water systems across the western half of the country.

[01:11:27]This is not designed to frighten you. It is designed to give you the full information picture so that you can plan accordingly. Whether that is water storage, evacuation route awareness for wildfire season, insurance review before hurricane season peaks, or simply knowing why your energy bills are higher than expected this summer. Understanding what the pattern is actually doing gives you real options. Not knowing leaves you reactive. If this video gave you a clearer picture of what is driving the weather in your region right now, share it. People in the drought zones deserve to understand why the rain is not coming.

[01:12:04]People on the Gulf Coast deserve to understand why the hurricane season has been quiet. People in Atlanta and Nashville and Charlotte deserve to understand why their summer has been wet and active when the pattern elsewhere looks so different. Tomorrow, I am watching the monsoon boundary over the southwest. There is a signal in the latest European run that the Gulf of California moisture surge could be stronger than the current official forecast is showing for Arizona and New Mexico by midweek. If that signal holds through the morning model runs, I will cover it in full because the flash flood potential from an unusually intense monsoon surge into burned landscapes is a real concern for communities in southern Arizona and along the Rio Grand corridor. The ocean has been telling us something since early spring. The atmosphere is listening now. And what the data is telling me today is that this event is still building, still coupling, still loading energy into a pattern that will express itself most dramatically in the months ahead.