Mesonet Ticker for June 11, 2026

                
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June 11, 2026      June 11, 2026      June 11, 2026      June 11, 2026


Nino Shmino




Well I could have led with today's heat, which will see heat index values crank
up to 105-110F along the I-44 corridor (and we all know just how painful that
can be).





Or with the possible severe weather today along a cold front pushing to the
southeast. Watch out for some hail to the size of golf balls, and winds pushing
70 mph. Tornadoes? Very low (but not zero, for crying out loud!).







Or the possible significant rains, uhhhhhhhh...possible, over the next 5 days.



Or the lovely weather Sunday after the cold front that's gonna help us get all
that rain this weekend!



But climatologists gonna climatize, so we're talking about the worst-kept
secret outside of the disgusting taste of Strawberry Pop-Tarts...El Nino is
finally here, and it could end up being one for the record books.

NOAA’s Climate Prediction Center issued an El Nino Advisory today, noting that
El Nino conditions have officially developed in the tropical Pacific. In other
words, the ocean-atmosphere combo meal is now on the board: warmer-than-average
sea surface temperatures across the central and eastern equatorial Pacific,
plenty of leftover subsurface warmth, westerly wind anomalies near the surface,
easterly wind anomalies aloft and negative Southern Oscillation index values.

Translation: the Pacific is no longer just thinking about El Nino. It’s doing
El Nino. Put that in your ENSO and smoke it!

The probabilities are also yelling a bit. CPC’s June ENSO strength outlook
gives El Nino a 97% chance for May–July and a 99% chance for June–August. I've
never actually seen their probabilities so dominated by one ENSO phase for the
entirety of their forecast period, all the way out to early next spring.



I mean, why even throw ENSO-Neutral those small bones at the bottom?? But
the real eyebrow-launcher comes later: for November–January, CPC now shows a
25% chance of a strong El Nino and a 63% chance of a very strong El Nino. Super-
Strong of "Godzilla" El Nino for those so inclined to hyperbole.



Add those together and that’s an 88% chance of strong or very strong El Nino
during the heart of winter.

Now, because weather is contractually obligated to be difficult, this does not
mean Oklahoma gets a guaranteed wet winter, snowy winter, mild winter, wild
winter or whatever winter your favorite social media weather account is
currently yelling about. ENSO strength does not automatically equal local
impact strength. But a stronger El Nino can load the dice more heavily toward
classic El Nino cool-season patterns, and this one is now worth watching very
closely as we move through summer, fall and into winter.



Bottom line: El Nino is here, and CPC expects it to strengthen. The tropical
Pacific has grabbed the microphone. Now we wait to see how loud it gets.

An important caveat: El Nino is not a light switch. It does not form on
Thursday and suddenly start steering every thunderstorm into Oklahoma on
Friday. But now that the Pacific ocean-atmosphere system has crossed into El
Nino territory, it can begin nudging the larger pattern. In early summer, that
influence is usually more subtle and less reliable than it is in winter, when
the jet stream is stronger and ENSO’s U.S. impacts tend to show up more
clearly.

So for Oklahoma, the better answer is: maybe some influence, but not domination.
Our late-spring and early-summer rainfall still depends much more on Gulf
moisture, fronts, upper-level disturbances, storm complexes, the MJO and plain
old mesoscale chaos — the atmosphere’s favorite brand of nonsense.

Whatever happens, it's better than La Nina...the Strawberry Pop-Tart of ENSO
phases.

Gary McManus
State Climatologist
Oklahoma Mesonet
Oklahoma Climate Survey
gmcmanus@ou.edu

                

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