ENSO Impacts

This section contains tools that help explore the historical relationship between ENSO and regional climate.

ENSO events (in particular to the strong El Niño events of 1982–83 and 1997–98) have been connected to impacts on almost every aspect of human life: disease outbreaks, low and high agricultural yields, natural disasters, availability of water resources, energy demand, disruption to hydropower generation, price fluctuations, fishery catch fluctuations, animal movements, forest fires, the economic well-being of nations, and many others.

Overall, however, ENSO impacts are only a subset of the impacts of year-to-year climate variability. At most ENSO may be responsible for about 50% of seasonal climate variability in some regions, but in most regions of the world its influence is much smaller.