Draw the next 18 months.
After a super El Niño, will the Pacific flip hard into La Niña, settle to neutral, or stay warm for a second year? Drag the path through the 2027–28 winter, or pick a scenario. The explorer finds the past paths since 1940 that look most like yours and shows what their winters did to the United States. That is a history of similar paths, not a forecast of which path comes.
Your path
Black: MEI-ERA5 observed. Grey: SEAS5's 51 members to February 2027. Magenta: your path. Drag the handles, or use the arrow keys on a focused handle.
Winters that followed paths like yours
Today's precipitation debt since Sep 2020, plus a median strong El Niño winter now, plus what your path's analog winters brought next. Only the two cold seasons (Nov–Mar) are added.
The closest paths
| Winter | Distance | DJF MEI |
|---|
Distance: the plan's recency-weighted sum over 36 months, D = Σ e−k/12[path − past]². Smaller is closer, and the months nearest February 2028 count most.
How to read this
Each map counts how many of the closest past winters landed in the warm or cold (wet or dry) third of Dec–Feb winters, trend removed, in each of NOAA's 344 climate divisions. By chance about 2 of 6 would land in any third, so only the deeper colours mean much, and six winters are a small sample. The explorer answers "if the Pacific goes this way, what did winters like that look like?" It does not say how likely your path is. That is the job of the model layer: NOAA's SFS 12-month runs, calibrated on their reforecasts.