Route 12 · Your county
What El Niño means here.
Pick a county. You get where each strong El Niño winter since 1950 landed there, the 2026–27 odds from history with the warming trend split out, and the number most sites leave out: how much skill that history has actually had there, tested by forecasting every past winter without looking at it.
Where history has skill
Leave-one-winter-out, every countyHow much the ENSO history layer has known, county by county
Every winter from 1950–51 to 2024–25 was forecast without itself: the trend, the thirds and the class counts were all refitted without it. The forecast came from the winters in the same ENSO class, pulled toward one-in-three, and was scored against climatology (ranked probability skill score; 0 = no better than climatology, 1 = perfect).
Source: NOAA NCEI nClimDiv county monthly data; Dec–Feb; ENSO class groups from the ONI classes (strong El Niño, other El Niño, neutral, La Niña); shrinkage toward one-in-three with weight 6. Select a county on the map to open it.