Bali Is Being Dried by Two Oceans at Once

On the Bukit plateau, the southern tip of Bali lifted some two hundred metres above the ocean, no green was left by the end of August. Fifteen thousand steps along the dirt roads between Pandawa and Uluwatu, and the whole way is brown earth, bare branches, red dust on the leaves of the few shrubs still holding any. Macaques walk alongside, indifferent: tourists feed them. Billboards line the road selling villas, and every billboard shows lush tropical green.

The temptation to read this landscape as the end of the world is strong. The data says something more precise and, in its own way, more troubling: the island has been caught by a convergence of two ocean anomalies, each capable of producing a drought on its own, and together they have not met since 2019.

What the instruments show

NOAA's Climate Prediction Center, in its bulletin of 13 August 2026, maintains El Niño Advisory status. The Niño 3.4 index — the key measure of sea-surface temperature anomaly in the equatorial Pacific — stood at plus 1.4 degrees for July. On its own that is a moderate event. The trajectory matters more: NOAA puts the probability that El Niño becomes a very strong event during the autumn and winter of 2026–27 at above ninety percent.

This forecast deserves slow reading. It is not about a hot year. It is about the probability of exceeding the upper bound of everything measured instrumentally in 76 years. The 1997–98 event, after which Indonesia burned for months, and the 2015–16 event, which collapsed harvests across Southeast Asia, sat roughly at this level — and the current forecast gives two-to-one odds that both will be surpassed.

The second ocean

El Niño lives in the Pacific. The other half of the problem arrived from the west, out of the Indian Ocean. The Indian Ocean Dipole has shifted into its positive phase: water off East Africa is warmer than normal, water off Sumatra and Java colder. Convection does not build over cold water, and without convection no rain gathers over the Indonesian archipelago. The monsoon takes a hit from precisely the direction moisture normally arrives.

Indonesia's National Research and Innovation Agency, BRIN, describes the current season directly as a superposition of a super El Niño and a positive dipole. The last such convergence came in 2019 and produced one of the decade's harshest droughts, with peat fires, regional smoke haze and closed schools.

What it has already done to the island

By BMKG's reckoning the dry season reached Bali in March, ahead of normal: roughly 65 percent of the island's seasonal zones entered it early. The season's character is rated below normal for ninety percent of Bali's territory, its peak assigned to August–September, its total length around six months. By mid-August, 79.9 percent of Indonesia's territory was in the dry season.

The provincial disaster management agency BPBD Bali, reporting for 11 April through 28 August 2026: 529 households across fourteen villages, 158.53 hectares of affected land, three regencies — Buleleng in the north, Jembrana in the west, Karangasem in the east. A total of 305,000 litres of drinking water distributed: 158,000 to Buleleng, 137,000 to Jembrana, 10,000 to Karangasem. State services were not alone in the distribution; the Red Cross, the military and the police joined in.

In Jembrana specifically the count climbed visibly through August: first 596 households without access to clean water, then 971. Bali also entered BMKG fire reporting, alongside West Kalimantan, Aceh, Bangka Belitung, Central and East Java.

Why the south looks worse than it counts

Badung — the regency holding Bukit and the entire southern resort belt — does not appear on the list of affected areas. The affected are the north, west and east: rural districts where people depend on wells and rain-fed farming.

This does not mean the south is wetter. It means there is nobody there to enter a disaster report. Bukit has no farmers with a dry well; it has tourism, utility pipes and water trucks, and drought there converts not into a statistic but into a water bill. The same drought reads in a village as a tanker of relief water, and two hours away as a brown landscape with a full swimming pool beside it.

Bukit's geology makes its own contribution, larger than commonly assumed. The peninsula is built of limestone: rainwater does not linger on the surface but drains down through karst fissures. Bukit has not a single permanent river. The volcanic ridge in the island's centre — Agung, Batukaru, Batur — intercepts moisture, leaving the low flat southern plateau in a rain shadow. Central Bali receives two to three thousand millimetres of rainfall a year; Bukit gets on the order of one thousand. Balinese historically called this land tanah tandus, barren: flooded rice terraces are impossible there, and what grew was cassava, corn and peanuts.

What the brown colour cannot tell you

Honesty is owed in both directions here. Bukit's vegetation is tropical dry forest, not rainforest. Teak, lontar palm and acacia shed their leaves in drought deliberately, to stop losing water. A bare skeleton of a tree in August is not agony, it is a strategy refined over millions of years. After the first rains the same slope greens over within a week or two.

Telling dormancy from death takes five minutes and bare hands. A living tree in drought stays flexible: the branch bends, and under the bark, scratched away with a fingernail, a green moist layer shows. Dead wood snaps dry, its bark flaking off over brown beneath. The distinction matters because it guards against two errors at once — panic at an ordinary seasonal landscape, and complacency where the land really has been killed.

And killed it usually is not by climate. Clearing for construction strips the scrub and bares the thin red soil over rock — and the plot dies for real, only the bulldozer killed it, not El Niño.

What comes next

The peak of the event is forecast for October through December. Strong El Niño events systematically delay the onset of the monsoon, so the rainy season, which in an ordinary year reaches Bali in late October or November, will most likely shift. The green will return — later than usual, possibly by December. For the rural north and west that means several more months of water arriving by tanker.

For now Bukit is unchanged: a brown plateau, macaques along the road, and billboards promising tropical green. The billboards were shot in March.