About Global Weather Watch

Global Weather Watch is an independent, non-commercial project that tracks the climate system from pole to pole: El Niño and the other ocean–atmosphere patterns, extreme weather and natural hazards, the polar regions, space weather and Earth's rotation. It explains why notable events happen — the setup, the trigger and the amplifiers — and tests popular claims honestly against the data.

This site is not an official forecast or warning service. For warnings and safety decisions, always follow your national weather service and local authorities.

What is on the dashboard

• Overview, Ocean, Atmosphere, Background drivers — ENSO (Niño indices, ONI, RONI, SOI, heat content, trade winds, OLR, MJO), PDO, IOD, AMO, NAO, PNA, QBO.
• Planet — global temperature (NASA GISTEMP), CO₂ (NOAA Mauna Loa), Northern Hemisphere snow cover (Rutgers).
• Hazards and Storm timeline — earthquakes (USGS), volcanoes (Smithsonian GVP, USGS), tropical cyclones (NHC, JTWC), floods, fires and drought (GDACS, NASA FIRMS).
• Why it happened — event-by-event explanations of 2026's extremes.
• Poles, Space & Poles — sea ice and the ozone hole (NSIDC, NASA), polar stations, the polar vortex and Arctic Oscillation (CPC, GFS), Greenland, sea level (NOAA CO-OPS, NOAA LSA), coral heat stress (NOAA Coral Reef Watch), geomagnetic storms and the solar cycle (NOAA SWPC, SILSO), polar motion (IERS).
• Local — Southern California: forecasts, fire weather, reservoirs and rainfall history (NWS, Open-Meteo, CAL FIRE, CDEC, NOAA).
• Correlations, Sky cycles, History — statistical tests of claimed links (ENSO and hazards, planetary cycles, Moon phase and the Chandler wobble vs earthquakes), with corrections for chance.

How the statistics are done

Slow cycles and persistent climate indices produce chance correlations easily. Each p-value is therefore tested against surrogate series with the same persistence (phase-randomised), and large batches of tests are corrected for multiple testing (Benjamini–Hochberg). Earthquake catalogues are declustered (Gardner–Knopoff) before testing, so aftershocks do not inflate the counts. A claim is reported as supported only when it survives these checks.

Data, credit and licence

All figures come from public sources, credited on each chart and in the data archive. US government data (NOAA, NASA, USGS) are in the public domain; SILSO sunspot data are © Royal Observatory of Belgium (CC BY-NC); Open-Meteo data are CC BY 4.0. The analysis text on this site may be reused with credit to Global Weather Watch.

Updates

The data are refreshed in batches; every refresh is kept as a dated snapshot in the archive, and the full change history is public on GitHub.

Analysis and site prepared with Claude (Anthropic).