The figures on my ENSO and Climate data pages stopped updating a couple months ago because my main hard drive for storing this data became “read-only”. Luckily all the data was fine, so I had to buy a new drive and get things transferred over.

The initial problem was that I was using a drive formatted with Apple’s HFS+ on a linux machine. Why isn’t there a drive formatting scheme that works across all platforms yet!?

To make matters worse, when I tried to format the drives with an ext3 or ext4 file system, the drive still couldn’t be mounted right, so it was still read-only. Eventually I just had to settle for using the older ext2 file system. I’m still not sure why this wasn’t working, maybe it’s an issue with OpenSuse?

It took a few days to get it sorted out, but hopefully these pages will stay up to date, and I can put some energy into adding more live diagnostics!

Now the figures are all updated, and you can nicely see how the peak in the current El Nino event compares to the 1998 event.