I'm glad you appreciate Emily's intelligent, yet personable style of communicating. I agree 100%. About the El Nino climate effects adhering to state boundaries, it is not your imagination, but is indeed an artifact of the analysis method. That method uses discrete blocks of area called "climate divisions", of which there are 344 (I believe!) across the continental U.S. These divisions often have borders that match the state boundaries, and also attempt to conform to natural climate-determining boundaries such as mountain ranges or more subtle terrain features. So, the analysis is not totally continuous, but discrete. Of course, individual weather stations are used to determine the values of the climate divisions; in the western part of the country there are fewer stations, so the climate divisions tend to be larger.