Two warm-water windows on one unshifted clock

Two warm-water windows on one unshifted clock

Question. Did the 1982–83 and 1997–98 El Niños warm on the same calendar?

• Encoding. Two colored paths retain the monthly anomalies in the predeclared two-year windows.
• Ordering. Each path runs from January of its first year; peaks are not shifted into alignment.
• Baseline. Zero is the selected calendar-month climatology.
• Scale. Shared linear Celsius anomaly scale and identical 1–24 month index.

What this design gives up

A two-window comparison cannot establish the distribution of all events or a causal explanation.

The two windows are illustrative, predeclared spans, not an automated event sample. Alignment begins in January of each first year and does not align peaks or event onset. No causal attribution follows.