National Cattlemen June 2026 | Page 14

By Matt Makens Atmospheric Scientist

WEATHER UPDATE

Drought has a firm grip on much of the country right now, and if you’ ve been watching the U. S. Drought Monitor, you already know the numbers aren’ t encouraging. I want to spend some time this month putting the current situation in historical context, specifically, what the relationship between El Niño and drought has looked like across the past 26 years and what that history tells us about the road ahead.

To start, I think it helps to understand just how significant the current drought is. As of this spring, nearly two out of every three acres across the Southern Plains( Kansas, Oklahoma, Texas, New Mexico, Arkansas and Louisiana) sat in severe drought or worse. Going back through the Drought Monitor record to 2000, only about 7 % of the time has been as bad or worse for this region.

The two-decade drought record reveals a pattern that I believe is worth understanding. The worst drought episodes tend to follow La Niña, when sea surface temperatures are below normal in the tropical Pacific. The summer drought of 2011, when nearly 88 % of the Southern Plains sat in severe drought or worse, arrived due to a strong La Niña. The 2020 – 2023 triple-dip La Niña was also relentless: the region averaged 39 % in severe drought over three full years, peaking at nearly 71 %. La Niña’ s fingerprint is hard to miss— it delivers widespread severe drought.

The flip side of that pattern is El Niño, and I know there is a lot of hope tied up in what it can do for producers in the southern tier of the country. When warm Pacific water shifts the jet stream south, storm systems get funneled through the Southwest and into the Plains through fall and winter. In the right years, the results are dramatic.

But here is something I feel gets missed in a lot of the conversation about El Niño: the relief doesn’ t arrive the moment the event is declared. The ocean warms first; the atmosphere responds over several weeks, and only then does the precipitation signal start to appear. El Niño’ s greatest impact on drought typically arrives two to four months after the event’ s peak intensity, which most often occurs from November through January, meaning the strongest precipitation signal falls in the December through March window.

The 2015 – 2016 El Niño demonstrated this almost perfectly. The event peaked in December 2015. The Southern Plains had nearly one-third of its area in severe drought that fall. In weeks, by that winter, that number had fallen to zero. I think that’ s worth sitting

with for a moment, from widespread severe drought to near drought-free conditions in roughly two months, driven by that delayed El Niño moisture signal arriving right on schedule.

What happened after that event matters just as much as the event itself. Once the 2015 – 2016 El Niño ended in spring 2016, the Southern Plains had limited drought coverage for approximately 18 months. Through the summer and fall of 2017, severe drought coverage averaged around 8 %. It wasn’ t until a new La Niña arrived in late 2017 that drought began to rebuild in earnest. I should note that the duration of relief isn’ t guaranteed; the 2009 – 2010 El Niño gave only about six months of improvement before La Niña reversed the gains. How long the relief holds depends heavily on what ENSO conditions follow— in this case, how long El Niño lasts before La Niña returns.

This brings me to the 2023 – 2024 El Niño. That event was quasi-comparable in peak strength to the 2015 – 2016 event. For the western U. S., it delivered water: severe drought coverage in the West dropped from a peak near 80 % to less than 5 %, and gave meaningful relief to western ranchers. For the Southern Plains, however, it was a different story entirely. Rather than the stereotypical moisture surge, roughly one-third of the region remained in severe drought during that same window. The jet stream positioning that made 2015 – 2016 so effective for the Plains did not do the same for 2023 – 2024( there are reasons for this, including upper-atmosphere oscillations that fluctuate every 12-18 months or so, acting as a boost or barrier for classic El Niño storm flows).

I’ m not trying to leave you with a discouraging message here, because El Niño’ s track record for the industry is real. When a strong event connects with the Plains, and history shows it can, the relief can be dramatic and last well over a year. But El Niño is a pattern, not a promise. The same Pacific warming that washed away drought in 2016 targeted California and the Desert Southwest in 2024 instead, and the Plains are still paying the price.

For producers planning ahead, the most honest thing I can tell you is this: the path out of the current drought requires a future El Niño that delivers for the right geography, and that’ s worth watching carefully as this year’ s event develops. As it stands today, though, this event is on track to help many producers in drought … better news than we’ ve had in the past two years, and it could be the most helpful moisture generator we’ ve had in about a decade.

14 JUNE 2026 www. NCBA. org