The shape of every El Niño looks a little different, but what about the recent super El Niños?

There haven't been too many, but NASA is already drawing comparisons between this year's El Niño and the last two events.

You're used to looking at water temperatures and departures with us, but NASA took a slightly different approach.

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Warmer water (and air) is slightly more expansive than cooler water, so we can track the strength of El Niño by how much higher sea level is closer to South America than it is closer to Australia and Indonesia.

So the eastern Pacific is higher than normal because of thermal expansion while the waters in the western Pacific are lower than normal because of the weaker trade winds.

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El Niño has flattened the Pacific. The trade winds normally stack water up about a foot and a half higher on the Indonesia side. This year, that hill has mostly washed out.

Compared to normal, the eastern Pacific is running about a foot higher than average while waters near Indonesia are half a foot lower.

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The maps below show how big of a difference there is compared to average — reds indicate a higher than average sea level near the Galapagos Islands and much of the eastern Pacific, and blues indicate where sea level has temporarily dropped in the western Pacific.

One of the starkest differences between this and the 1997-98 El Niño is how broad the warm water is on both sides of the equator and northward to Mexico. The area of lower sea level to the west is also quite expansive.

One thumbprint that 2015's El Niño had was that the warmest waters were removed away from the South American continent, but 1997 and 2026 have all that warm water pinned up along the coast of Central and South America. This should lead to impacts being more similar to 1997 than 2015.

(MORE: Latest El Niño news and forecast)

Jonathan Belles has been a digital meteorologist for weather.com for 10 years. His favorite weather is tropical weather, but also enjoys covering high-impact weather and news stories and winter storms. He's a two-time graduate of Florida State University and a proud graduate of St. Petersburg College.