The Philippines' Dry Spell Widens: PAGASA Climbs Its Alert Ladder Toward a 47-Province Projection

The Philippines sits directly beneath the atmospheric machinery El Niño rearranges. When the Pacific's warm pool slides east, the rain goes with it, and the archipelago dries out from the north down. In 2026 that drying arrived early and has been widening ever since — province by province, on a map the national weather service redraws each month.

The mechanism: rain follows the warm water east

Normally, the western Pacific warm pool anchors towering convection over the Philippines and its neighbours. El Niño displaces that convection thousands of kilometres east, leaving sinking, dry air over the archipelago — a longer, harsher dry season and a delayed monsoon onset. The regional physics is one of the cleanest teleconnections in the climate system; see the science of teleconnections for the global map.

The important caveat is that El Niño does not simply switch off Philippine rainfall. PAGASA's own advisory language stresses that while El Niño raises the likelihood of below-normal rainfall overall, the western side of the country can still see above-normal rainfall during the southwest monsoon, the habagat. Drought and flooding are not mutually exclusive here; they arrive in different places, and sometimes in the same season.

Climbing the ladder

PAGASA escalated its ENSO messaging through the first half of the year, issuing El Niño Advisory No. 1 on 9 June 2026, signed by Administrator Nathaniel T. Servando. The advisory records that El Niño conditions are present in the tropical Pacific, that the observed relative sea surface temperature anomaly (rSSTA) reached the +0.5 °C threshold in May 2026, and that most climate models suggest over an 80% probability the event develops into a full-blown El Niño likely to persist until early 2027.

The impact tally is already substantial. In its May 2026 rainfall assessment, PAGASA counted 19 provinces in meteorological drought, 29 under dry spells and four experiencing dry conditions — below-to-way-below-normal rainfall across Luzon and most of the Visayas, with near- to above-normal rainfall confined to Mindanao. Philippine business press has since projected 47 provinces facing dry conditions by November 2026, a forecast that goes beyond what PAGASA's own advisory states. The distinction between those categories matters: they are graded by persistence, so an area typically escalates from dry conditions to dry spell to drought as monthly deficits stack up. A widening map is the visible edge of a deepening one.

The exposure that carries furthest runs through rice. The Philippines is one of the world's largest rice importers, and a domestic harvest squeezed by drought pushes import demand into a global market already tightened by India's export restrictions.

The wider maritime continent

The same displaced convection is drying the rest of the archipelago belt. BMKG's weekly outlook for 31 July–6 August states plainly that Indonesia is entering a strong El Niño phase, with drought and karhutla — forest and land fire — danger looming. Indonesia's exposure runs through a different and more combustible mechanism, drained peatland, covered in detail in our Indonesian fire season report.

Calibration and the lag

The 2015–16 event is the modern benchmark: a Philippine drought that ran deep into 2016, alongside severe Indonesian fires and regional haze. The 1997–98 precedent is worse. Both carry the same structural lesson about timing — water and agricultural stress trails the ocean peak by months rather than tracking it. With the Pacific forecast to reach a very strong maximum between November 2026 and January 2027, the 47-province projection matures just as the event peaks, and the hardest months run into the first half of 2027.

What to watch next

Watch PAGASA's monthly advisories as the drought and dry-spell lists lengthen toward the November projection; the National Irrigation Administration's allocation decisions as the dry season sets in; reservoir levels at Angat and the other systems serving Metro Manila and Luzon's irrigation networks; and Philippine rice import volumes, which are the clearest single signal of how badly the harvest has been hit. The country's trajectory through the peak will be logged on our event timeline.