El Niño’s Long Game: Why India’s Most Important Weather Forecast Keeps Getting It Wrong
And what 2026’s looming Super El Niño means for your food, water, and winter
There is a weather phenomenon that has caused more famines in India than any war, disrupted more harvests than any pest, and humiliated more meteorologists than any other climate system on Earth. It begins not in India, not even close. It starts in the Pacific Ocean, roughly 14,000 kilometres from Mumbai, where a pulse of warm water quietly defies the trade winds. By the time anyone in New Delhi notices, it may already be too late for the kharif crop.
This is El Niño. And in 2026, it is coming back possibly stronger than ever.
What Actually Happens in the Pacific
El Niño is not a storm. It is not a season. It is a breakdown of the ocean-atmosphere machinery that normally keeps the tropics in balance.
Under normal conditions, trade winds blow westward across the Pacific, piling up warm surface water near Indonesia and Australia. This warm western pool fuels the convective storms that eventually feed Asia’s monsoons. The eastern Pacific, near Peru, stays relatively cool, cold water upwells from the deep and keeps coastal South America arid.
El Niño breaks this arrangement. The trade winds weaken. The warm water blob that normally sits near Australia sloshes back eastward toward South America. Sea surface temperatures in the central and eastern Pacific rise by 0.5°C to sometimes over 3°C above normal. The entire machinery reverses. Rains flood Peru. Drought grips Indonesia. And India caught somewhere in the middle, holds its breath.
The name came from Peruvian fishermen in the 17th century. They noticed unusually warm coastal waters appearing around Christmas, which they called El Niño “the Christ child.” No one imagined then that this local anomaly was connected to droughts in Maharashtra and floods in Assam.
The Walker Circulation: The Invisible Engine
The mechanism connecting Pacific warming to Indian rainfall is called the Walker Circulation, a giant loop of rising and sinking air straddling the equatorial Indo-Pacific.
El Niño events shift the Walker Circulation pressure pattern, leading to higher than normal pressure over the eastern Indian Ocean and weaker monsoonal winds. In plain terms: the atmospheric engine that drives moisture toward India essentially stalls. The conveyor belt of rain-bearing westerlies loses power. Monsoon onset delays. Rainfall shortfalls compound over weeks.
Here is the hidden complexity that most articles skip: it is not just whether El Niño occurs, but where in the Pacific it peaks.
If ocean warming is in the Central Pacific, the sinking branch of the circulation expands to include India, reducing seasonal rainfall. However, if the warming shifts to the far Eastern Pacific, the sinking column may not affect the Indian monsoon but corrupt rains over Indonesia and Southeast Asia.
This Central Pacific vs. Eastern Pacific distinction, what scientists call CP-ENSO vs. EP-ENSO is arguably the single biggest reason India’s monsoon forecasts kept failing for decades. The old forecasting models were tuned to the “classic” Eastern Pacific El Niño. But since the 1980s, Central Pacific events became more frequent. The models were essentially fighting the last war.
Seven Decades of Forecasting Failures: The Honest Reckoning
Since India’s independence, the IMD has issued annual monsoon forecasts with varying accuracy. The embarrassing truth, captured in peer-reviewed research, is sobering.
Despite enormous progress in predicting Indian Summer Monsoon Rainfall since 1886, operational forecasts during recent decades (1989–2012) have little skill. This recent failure is largely due to models’ inability to capture new predictability sources emerging during recent global warming particularly the development of the Central-Pacific ENSO, the rapid deepening of the Asian Low, and the strengthening of North and South Pacific Highs during spring.
In other words, the climate changed, but the forecast models did not adapt fast enough. The old teleconnections, the statistical links between Pacific temperatures and Indian rainfall that Gilbert Walker first mapped in the 1920s, quietly weakened or shifted geography. The models built on historical data were reading an outdated map.
A landmark 1999 paper in Science by Kumar, Rajagopalan, and Cane added another twist: increased surface temperatures over Eurasia in winter and spring, part of the midlatitude continental warming trend, may favour the enhanced land-ocean thermal gradient conducive to a strong monsoon. These observations raise the possibility that Eurasian warming in recent decades helps to sustain monsoon rainfall at a normal level despite strong ENSO events.
Translation: a warming Siberia and Central Asia actually helps India’s monsoon by intensifying the land-sea temperature contrast that pulls moist air inland. This partially explains why several El Niño years after 2000 produced surprisingly normal Indian rainfall. The forecasters who ignored Eurasian snow cover and land warming kept getting surprised.
When El Niño Hit India Hardest
Not all El Niños are equal for India. Out of 13 drought years since 1950, 11 were El Niño years. But of the 23 El Niño years, only 10 were drought years. The relationship is real but messier than textbooks suggest.
The worst blows:
- 1972: Rainfall deficiency of 23.9% below normal, second worst on record. Severe food crisis.
- 1987: Widespread drought; the monsoon arrived three weeks late across central India.
- 2002: Agricultural GDP fell 7%, a loss of approximately USD 8 billion. Food production tumbled 18%.
- 2009: Rainfall 22% below normal, third worst on record. Sugarcane, pulses, and rice devastated.
The great exception: 1997-98. This was one of the five strongest El Niño events ever recorded — and India escaped almost unscathed. The 1997 El Niño, one of the strongest on record, didn’t cause drought because a concurrent positive Indian Ocean Dipole compensated. A phenomenon operating entirely within the Indian Ocean quietly cancelled out the Pacific’s fury.
The IOD: India’s Secret Weather Shield
The Indian Ocean Dipole (IOD) is perhaps the most underreported factor in the India-El Niño story.
The IOD measures the temperature difference between the western and eastern Indian Ocean. A positive IOD, warmer west, cooler east enhances Indian monsoon rainfall and can counter El Niño’s negative effects.
Think of it as India’s built-in backstop. When El Niño weakens the Pacific’s contribution to the monsoon, a positive IOD can compensate by intensifying evaporation in the western Indian Ocean, feeding more moisture toward the subcontinent. The 1997 miracle was essentially a game of two tug-of-war teams pulling in opposite directions and the IOD won.
The catch: IOD and ENSO do not always cooperate. Some years, both go negative simultaneously, and India faces a compounded rainfall deficit. 2002 and 2009 were roughly such years.
2026: The Threat Is Real And Unusually Complex
India Meteorological Department (IMD) has forecast below-normal monsoon rainfall at 92% of Long Period Average. A developing El Niño, marked by warming of the eastern Pacific Ocean, is likely to suppress monsoon rainfall, signalling a likely end to two consecutive years of above-normal rainfall in 2024-25.
Sea surface temperatures remain near record highs, increasing concerns about a possible Super El Niño later this year. Positive IOD conditions may reduce the adverse impact of El Niño on the Indian monsoon.
Snow cover across the Northern Hemisphere and Eurasia from January to March 2026 was smaller than normal. While reduced snow cover would ordinarily support an earlier and stronger monsoon, the large-scale suppression of convection driven by El Niño is likely to negate this effect.
The cruel irony: Eurasia’s lower snow cover which should help India’s monsoon is being cancelled out by El Niño’s broader atmospheric suppression. It is not one lever being pulled; it is three levers moving simultaneously in different directions.
What Farmers and Planners Should Watch For
Across 15 El Niño years since 1972, average rainfall deviated -9.2% from normal. Average Kharif production growth was -5.4%. During strong and moderate El Niño years, agricultural GVA growth turned negative.
Crops most at risk in 2026: rice, pulses, maize, oilseeds, particularly in northwest and peninsular India. States historically worst-hit include Maharashtra, Karnataka, Rajasthan, Uttar Pradesh, and parts of Bihar.
Winter rabi crops face a secondary risk: El Niño leads to higher-than-normal temperatures across India, increasing heat stress on crops and livestock. A warm winter shortens the growing window for wheat, India’s most strategic staple and can significantly reduce grain weight at harvest.
The silver lining, if any, is institutional: India’s food storage buffers, irrigation infrastructure, and early warning systems are substantially stronger today than in 2009. Agricultural GDP no longer collapses the way it once did, even when rainfall fails. But that resilience has limits, and a Super El Niño would test them.
The Larger Picture: Climate Change Is Changing El Niño
This is where it gets genuinely unsettling. El Niño has always been natural. But a warmer baseline ocean means each El Niño now starts from a higher temperature floor. The most recent El Niño, in 2023-24, was one of the five strongest on record and played a role in the record global temperatures seen in 2024.
The interaction between climate change and ENSO is not linear. It does not simply mean more droughts. It means more variability, more intense wet years, more severe dry years, more unpredictable transitions. India’s monsoon, which feeds over a billion people, is being asked to function within a system whose rules are quietly rewriting themselves.
The forecasters know this. The models are improving. AI-based approaches at IIT Delhi now show Spearman correlations of 0.97 in hindcasts, vastly better than the -0.12 skills of older IMD empirical models. But knowing a storm is coming and knowing exactly where it will land are two different things.
India has survived every El Niño it has ever faced. The question for 2026 is not survival — it is cost.
The Pacific is warming. The Walker Circulation is shifting. The IOD is watching. And somewhere in a field in Vidarbha, a farmer is watching the sky.