ENSO Explorer: Mapping El Niño and La Niña Impacts Across Southern Africa

RAMP Lab has launched ENSO Explorer, a free online tool that shows how rainfall and other climate conditions across Southern Africa have historically behaved during El Niño, La Niña and Neutral seasons. It is available now at enso.ubramplab.org.

What it does

When El Niño or La Niña develops, planners across the region ask the same question: what has this tended to mean for our rains? ENSO Explorer answers that with maps. For a chosen ENSO phase, strength and season, it shows how a range of agriculturally relevant indicators have responded across the region: seasonal rainfall, reference evapotranspiration, the SPEI drought index, the crop water balance (WRSI), maximum temperature and heat extremes, dry spells, and the timing of the rainy season (onset, cessation and length).

Each indicator can be viewed three ways: as a composite anomaly, as a percent of average, and as the frequency of a drier or wetter outcome across the matching historical years. The tool auto-loads the latest NOAA Climate Prediction Center forecast and pre-selects the most likely phase, strength and season, which the user can override at any time. Coverage spans the SADC region at national and provincial level, built on CHIRPS rainfall, CHIRTS-ERA5 temperature, and a long-term reference evapotranspiration reanalysis.

An experimental decision-support brief

Alongside the maps, ENSO Explorer now includes an experimental decision-support brief. Clicking on a country or province produces a plain-language summary of what comparable El Niño or La Niña seasons have looked like for that area: the share of past analogue years that were drier or wetter, the typical shift in each indicator, the list of analogue years, and interannual charts. The brief can be downloaded as a PDF.

This feature is experimental and is not intended to replace official forecasts. For country-specific guidance, we direct users to their National Meteorological and Hydrological Service.

Methodology and paper

The framework behind ENSO Explorer is described in a preprint, Magadzire et al. (2026), available on EarthArXiv (doi:10.31223/X5CF7Z) and under review at Climate Services. The ENSO Explorer framework article was developed by the University of Botswana RAMP Lab in collaboration with the SADC Climate Services Centre and the UCSB Climate Hazards Center.

Explore the tool at enso.ubramplab.org.