About three years ago, I made some maps illustrating the global relationships between El Niño/La Niña and temperature and precipitation. These have turned out to be quite popular, so I updated them using data up to February 2026. (See a brief methodology section at the bottom of this post.)
In the gallery below, I show the interannual correlation between seasonal (3-monthly) mean temperature and the Niño 3.4 index during the same seasons. The data were detrended. The first picture shows the correlations for January–March, and the last one shows December–February. By clicking on one of the pictures, you can navigate back and forth between seasons.
The next gallery shows correlations for precipitation.
Hope this is useful! Please contact me if you have suggestions for improvements.
Methodology
I used monthly mean ERA5 data for sea surface temperature (SST), 2-metre temperature, and (total) precipitation. All the data were downloaded for the period 1976–2026 (up to February only), and I linearly detrended all the data at the grid point level. The Niño 3.4 index was computed as the area-averaged SST anomaly between 170 and 120 deg. West, and from 5 deg. S to 5 deg. N.
Erik Kolstad 