Who Runs This Site
I'm Alex Chen. I've been tracking ENSO data and writing about El Niño and La Niña since early 2024. I don't have a PhD in atmospheric science — what I do have is an obsessive interest in how a patch of warm water in the Pacific can ripple through weather patterns, food prices, insurance markets, and government disaster planning across six continents.
I read the NOAA Climate Prediction Center's monthly diagnostic discussions, the WMO's ENSO updates, the IRI plume of forecast models, and the peer-reviewed literature on teleconnections. Then I translate that into something a homeowner in California or a wheat farmer in Australia can actually use.
If you find something inaccurate on this site, tell me and I'll fix it. I update the forecast-related pages whenever NOAA releases new ENSO data — typically around the second Thursday of each month.
Where the Data Comes From
Everything on this site is based on publicly available scientific data. The primary sources:
- NOAA Climate Prediction Center — monthly ENSO diagnostic discussions, ONI values, forecast probabilities
- NOAA Physical Sciences Laboratory — sea surface temperature anomaly data, subsurface ocean heat content, TAO/TRITON buoy array readings
- World Meteorological Organization — global ENSO bulletins and regional impact assessments
- IRI/Columbia University — multi-model ENSO forecast plume
- Peer-reviewed research — published in journals like Journal of Climate, Geophysical Research Letters, and Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society
How Content Is Made
I research and write each article based on the sources above. I use AI tools to help with drafting and editing, but every article is reviewed by me before it goes live. Schema.org structured data is included on every article to help search engines and AI systems understand the content structure, authorship, and source attribution.
Why No Ads
This site currently runs without advertising. The goal is to build a genuinely useful resource first. If traffic grows to a level where the site can support itself through non-intrusive advertising, I'll add it — transparently and without degrading the reading experience.
Technology
El Niño Guide is a static HTML site hosted on Cloudflare Pages, which means it loads fast from anywhere in the world. No JavaScript frameworks, no database, no tracking beyond anonymous Google Analytics for understanding which content people actually find useful.