El Nino Watch
Dated reports of what happened on Samui, Koh Phangan, Koh Tao and the southern provinces around each event (rationing, floods, bleaching, haze, heat, papers), each with a verbatim quote and a link checked live on the date shown.
Koh Samui watch
"Documented" is a kind of information, next to "reanalysis" (ERA5 numbers) and "observed" (NOAA indices): it means a dated page says so. Every entry carries the sentence quoted from the page, the publisher, the publication date and the day the link was checked. Nothing is inferred from the numbers: a dry Feb-Apr in ERA5 does not create a "water shortage" entry; a newspaper report does.
Types: water shortage (rationing, trucks, PWA notices), drought, flood, storm, haze, heat, bleaching (coral), paper (peer-reviewed studies of the region).
Entries are tagged with the El Nino event they belong to. Reports from La Nina or neutral years (the March 2011 floods, December 2016 to January 2017, storm Pabuk in January 2019, December 2022, November-December 2024) are kept under "not an El Nino year" so the timeline also shows what the northeast monsoon does to the island whatever ENSO says.
The "looked for, not found" list says which reports were searched for and did not surface (for example a Samui water-shortage report for 1998 or 2019-20), so a gap in the timeline is not read as "nothing happened".
Filter by type or by event. The badge "documented" links to the source; the date is the event date as the report gives it (a year alone when the report only gives the year).
Rain deficits become real through their consequences: in 2016 and 2024 Samui rationed water in the dry season after a strong El Nino. The timeline shows what those years looked like on the ground.