El Nino, historically considered a localized regional phenomenon, rose  to the forefront of the scientific research agenda thanks to the extraordinary
impacts of the 1972--1973 event. Widespread droughts led to a decline in global food production, the first time since the advent of the Green revolution. 

A drastic crash in anchoveta catches led to the collapse of the fishing industry in Peru. The 1982--1983 El Nino literally rained out Queen Elizabeth II's royal cruise towards California to meet President Reagan. El Nino catapulted into discourses of environmental politics and public science communication when the human and environmental disasters during the 1997--1998 El Nino was turned into a continuous spectacle by news outlets. 

Since 1997 many strong El Ninos have come and gone, but none had the scale and extremity of hydroclimatic impacts associated with the aforementioned events. What makes the 1972, 1982, and 1997 El Ninos distinct is their outstanding character of eastern-ocean intensification, marked by an increasing amplitude of anomalous sea surface temperatures and sea surface heights from the central towards the far-eastern Pacific. It is this remarkable eastern-ocean intensification that leads to its most notable impacts --- devastating floods in Peru and California, as the rain bearing systems break through the dry eastern equatorial Pacific to reach the  far eastern Pacific.

As an extremely strong El Nino rises up in 2026, the spectre looming is of widespread droughts, floods, and ecosystem damage, especially in the tropics.
The speaker would like to make the case why the 2026 El Nino's impact could be less dramatic than anticipated. He bases his reasoning on the
demonstrable consequences of equatorial ocean-atmosphere dynamics in limiting eastern-ocean intensification. Under ENSO dynamics, an atmospheric
Kelvin wave response develops to the east of the primary convective anomalies. The associated surface winds dampen SST variations in the
eastern Pacific, preventing eastern-ocean intensification.

In his hypothetical model, when a strong El Nino co-occurs with a positive Indian Ocean Dipole (IOD), this dynamics changes with the IOD inducing powerful surface wind anomalies across the western Pacific. These western Pacific wind anomalies offset the self-limiting damping effect and facilitates eastern-ocean intensification. This paradigm is used to explain the aberrant behavior
of the otherwise strong 2015-2016 El Nino's hydroclimatic impacts, and the features of the ongoing 2026 El Nino. Finally, I discuss the role of decadal variations as a factor in explaining the intensity of the strong El Ninos of 2015 and 2026.