El Nino Watch

NASA POWER for Koh Samui

NASA's daily satellite-and-model weather for the Samui grid cell, with 2001-2020 normals.

Data and trust

NASA Langley's POWER service combines the MERRA-2 / GEOS-IT weather reanalysis with CERES satellite sunshine data. The app asks it twice a day for the last 60 days of temperature, rain, humidity, wind and sunshine at 9.512 N 100.013 E, and for the 2001-2020 monthly normals of the same place.

Limits. One grid cell is about 50 km across and mixes sea and land, so it smooths out the island's own showers and hottest afternoons. Use trends, not single days.

How to read it

Values are daily, in local solar time: degC, mm of rain, % humidity, m/s wind, and kWh per m2 per day of sunshine. Temperature and rain arrive about 2-3 days late, sunshine about 5-7 days late. Missing days are simply absent (NASA marks them -999 and the app never stores those).

Why it matters for Koh Samui

It is an independent second source next to Open-Meteo/ERA5: if both say the last weeks were drier and hotter than normal, the signal is solid. In El Nino years Samui often gets a weaker, later rainy season (normally October-December).

Sources

ENSO status now

ONI (NOAA CPC)
+1.80 °C, JJA 2026 (previous +1.39 °C)
RONI (NOAA CPC)
+1.36 °C, JJA 2026
Nino 3.4 weekly (NOAA CPC / OISST)
+3.0 °C anomaly, week of 16 Sep 2026 (SST 29.6 °C)