ENSO 2026-27
El Niño is strengthening – and forecasts now rank the 2026-27 event among the strongest on record. Since June, every major forecasting centre has strengthened its outlook. See what Treefera’s September assessment means for coffee, cocoa and US grains.
Why the same El Niño produces different commodity outcomes
El Niño does not produce a single commodity outcome. Its effects depend on where a crop grows, when it is most vulnerable and the market conditions already in place.
In the Southern Plains, winter wheat production averages 18% above trend in El Niño years, with preceding-winter RONI correlated at r = +0.52. Robusta coffee faces the opposite signal: RONI and rainfall correlate at r = -0.69, with drought risk now concentrated in Vietnam's Gia Lai province and Brazil's conilon belt. In West Africa, the cocoa belt turns hotter and drier in roughly three-quarters of the historical years closest to today's forecast.
The ocean signal is shared. The physical and market outcomes are not.
Access the full ENSO 2026-27 First-Mile Briefing
This report explores the question everyone in softs and ags is asking: how will the ENSO impact vary around the world?
Four principles behind every commodity read in this report
Footprint-weighted climate stress
A regional anomaly matters only in proportion to where the crop actually grows. Every climate signal Treefera processes is weighted by the spatial distribution of the crop canopy, not by administrative boundaries or simple geographic averages.
Satellite vs. publication lag
Treefera's Greenprint Weather Pipeline derives crop-stress indices, canopy health and soil moisture from ERA5 reanalysis and satellite observation, updating continuously. In 2026, the HRW wheat belt's record spring precipitation deficit was quantified in April - two months before the May WASDE confirmed the shock.
Biological window awareness
ENSO's atmospheric consequences peak in November through January and decay by spring. Winter wheat's growing season spans that window; US corn's mid-July pollination sits entirely outside it. Two crops in the same country and the same grain belt face opposite ENSO exposures, determined entirely by the calendar.
Reference-class benchmarking
For each commodity, Treefera matches the forecast RONI value to its closest historical analogues, then reconstructs what the weather actually did in those years. This isolates climate-driven outcomes from management- and stock-driven ones - which is how a Very Strong El Niño (1982-83) can hit the same cocoa belt as 2023-24 and produce no price spike at all.
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FAQ
ONI measures the raw temperature anomaly in the central Pacific against a 30-year baseline. As the whole tropical ocean warms, that baseline drifts, so ONI reads consistently hot, and the current forecast is the largest ever recorded on ONI. RONI strips out that shared warming and keeps only the relative contrast that actually reorganises the atmosphere. Treefera builds from RONI because it is the gradient that drives the weather, not the headline number. As the season has progressed, additional ocean observations have moved the RONI reading itself: Treefera's own composite, updated through September, now puts the event at +3.24°C for the November-January peak, ahead of every prior event since 1950. NOAA's own official outlook reads a close second, behind only 1982-83. Both are legitimate reads of the same ocean; the gap now is about which model composite you trust, not about ONI versus RONI.
Clear Data. Clear Decisions.
Explore the full analogue methodology, the historical outcomes behind it, and Treefera's updated 2026-27 read for coffee, cocoa and US grains.
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