Global Teleconnections Dashboard

How to Read This Dashboard

A teleconnection is a statistical relationship between atmospheric or oceanic conditions in one part of the world and weather in another, often thousands of kilometres away. The panels above track the major ones in near real time. This section explains what they are measuring, where each number comes from, and what they cannot tell you.

What Each Family Covers

• ENSO and its relatives. The tropical Pacific's own internal variability, tracked here through the Nino region indices and the relative index NOAA now uses to classify events. ENSO seeds or modulates most of the other patterns on this page, which is why it sits first.
• Northern extratropical modes. NAO, AO and PNA, identified through rotated principal component analysis of 500-hPa height anomalies following Barnston and Livezey (1987). These govern midlatitude storm tracks and cold-air outbreaks over North America and Europe.
• Southern Hemisphere modes. SAM, the ring of pressure anomalies controlling the poleward position of the westerlies, plus the PSA wave trains that carry a Pacific signal into the Southern Ocean.
• Decadal modes. PDO and IPO shift over 20 to 80 years rather than seasons. They will not move a monthly forecast, but they modulate how ENSO itself behaves and teleconnects, which is why they are shown for context.
• The MJO. A 30 to 60 day pulse of tropical convection that can accelerate or stall ENSO development by supplying or withholding westerly wind bursts.

Where the Data Comes From and How Often It Updates

Every value on this page is pulled from a public agency feed rather than modelled here. Nino region values come from NOAA CPC's weekly relative table and update each Monday. Seasonal RONI comes from CPC's ERSSTv5 series and updates monthly. MJO phase and amplitude come from NOAA PSL. The full source list, with update cadence for each quantity, is documented on the methodology page.

Panels query these feeds when the page loads, so what you see is as current as the upstream agency has published. That is not the same as being current to today: a weekly value posted on Monday remains the newest value all week.

Which Index, and Why It Matters

This dashboard reports the relative Nino 3.4 index by default, because that is what NOAA CPC switched to in February 2026 for classifying events. NOAA also still publishes a conventional weekly table it never switched, and in mid-2026 the two differ by roughly 0.7 to 0.8 degrees Celsius for the same box in the same week. Neither is wrong. If a figure quoted elsewhere runs noticeably warmer than the one here, that difference is the likely reason, and it is explained in full in our RONI versus ONI explainer.

Limitations Worth Knowing

• Index values are revised. Weekly figures change after first posting and recent RONI values are estimates for up to two months.
• A teleconnection is a shift in odds across a season, not a cause of any individual weather event. This dashboard cannot tell you what the weather will do where you live.
• These indices are mutually correlated. Reading them as independent signals overstates the information available.
• Relationships are seasonally dependent. A pattern that reliably predicts winter conditions may carry no summer signal at all.
• Nothing here is an official forecast. For operational guidance consult NOAA CPC and your national meteorological service.

For the analog scoring tool and its full method, including the as-of rules that prevent look-ahead, see the analog methodology. For how this site sources and corrects its material, see the editorial standards.