Teleconnections
A strong El Niño has made a dry rainy season about twice as likely here; 2026 was late, patchy and drier in the north, but the records disagree on how dry. Floods do not follow El Niño. A hot March–May 2027 is the clearest effect still to come.
Graded robust by inheritance from Ethiopia's kiremt row. ERA5 supports the direction at moderate strength (JAS r ≈ −0.4), strongest along the Tigray border, weak in the northern highlands, and reversed on the Red Sea coast in winter. El Niño roughly doubles the odds of a driest-third kiremti.
2026/27 outlook for Gaza and the West Bank: a very strong El Niño, and forecasts for a wet October–December and a warm winter. Since 1979, 9 of 14 El Niño winters were in each area's wettest third, but the link did not exist before the late 1970s and strong events have been mixed. Gaza's displacement sites flood after ordinary rain; in the West Bank, Bedouin and herding communities, people displaced from the northern West Bank refugee camps and farmers are the most exposed.
Graded robust from the southern-Africa row, and the grade holds — but the season is wrong. Nationally DJF is uncorrelated with ENSO (r ≈ 0); the drying is late-season (JFM r ≈ −0.34, FMA −0.45) and confined to the centre and south, while the north gets a wetter early season. Seven of ten El Niño JFM seasons were in the south's driest third.
2026/27 outlook: SEAS5 forecasts a dry season nationwide (15–23-year return periods, moderate skill for NDJ–DJF) as Niño3.4 passes +1.9 °C; ten of fourteen El Niño DJF seasons since 1981 were in the driest third and none in the wettest; ENSO explains about half of Zimbabwe's DJF rainfall variance. FEWS NET already projects Crisis for a quarter of its units by October–January.
Each page pairs a curated evidence review (why the survey catalogue graded the country as it did, and what the literature actually supports) with figures recomputed from the survey's own ERA5 0.25° grid and the NOAA Niño3.4 index: the seasonal cycle, pixel-level correlation maps, a season-by-season rainfall history coloured by ENSO phase, and El Niño composite and drought hit-rate maps. The drought framing is deliberate: a correlation coefficient understates an asymmetric response, so each page reports how often El Niño seasons fell in the driest third, against a 33% base rate.
Add a country by dropping a deep_dives/<slug>.toml into the repo and running uv run python enso_deep_dive.py; see the README.