Get ready to hear more about El Niño in the coming months and perhaps even longer, as the infamous climate cycle returns once again, developing and intensifying in the equatorial Pacific Ocean. If El Niño occurs as predicted, it will rewrite the global weather map, causing flooding in some places, drought and wildfires in others, and accelerating the pace of global warming.
There are increasing signs that El Niño is not only imminent, but could be significant by late summer or early fall.
In fact, this could qualify as a “Super El Niño” and could significantly increase the impact felt around the world. Such a strong El Niño phenomenon is rare.
To declare an El Niño event, seawater temperatures in a particular region of the tropical Pacific generally need to be 0.5 degrees Celsius above the long-term average. In contrast, a Super El Niño occurs when temperatures are more than 2 degrees Celsius above average. Some commonly trusted computer models, such as the European Modeling Suite, predict just such an outcome for the plan’s go-around.
El Niño and La Niña, whose names mean “boy” and “girl,” are climate cycles that repeat every few years in the tropical Pacific Ocean and can have a significant impact on global weather patterns. In the case of El Niño, this cycle could bring both flooding and drought to various parts of Africa, bring winter storms to the West Coast of the United States, and cause more heatwaves worldwide.
El Niño is characterized by unusually warm ocean waters along the equatorial tropical Pacific Ocean and a series of associated changes in atmospheric wind and precipitation patterns. This is a so-called coupled phenomenon, meaning that for El Niño to occur, both the ocean and atmosphere must be reacting to each other in a characteristic way.
The atmosphere tends to respond to rising ocean temperatures by moving areas of high precipitation closer to warmer regions of the ocean. Trade winds, which typically blow from east to west near the equator, weaken and then sometimes reverse direction. These changes are significant enough to affect weather around the world like a series of dominoes falling.
A large amount of unusually warm water is currently spreading below the ocean’s surface across the western and eastern parts of the tropical Pacific Ocean, and that water is slowly rising to the surface in a clear precursor to El Niño. Regions of periodic winds blowing from west to east, a phenomenon aptly known as westerly wind bursts, help transport this water.
El Niño and La Niña (El Niño’s cooler sibling) are fascinating from a meteorological perspective, but we’re interested in them because of how they can affect extreme weather events around the world. In fact, El Niño can cause billions of dollars in damage, and normal impacts can become more severe as El Niño strengthens.
Nat Johnson, a meteorologist at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s Geophysical Fluid Dynamics Laboratory, said that detecting El Niños as they form and predicting their development “can provide early insight into the changing risks of many weather-related phenomena, including floods, droughts, heat waves, hurricanes, and severe thunderstorms.” “These weather and climate impacts affect crop yields, disease spread, coral bleaching, fisheries, and many other parts of the Earth system that affect our daily lives.”
Mr Johnson said there was still a lot of uncertainty regarding the future of El Niño, particularly regarding its strength, including varying forecast outcomes. The issue of cloud computing will be discussed a little later. Computer model predictions made in the spring tend to be less accurate than predictions made at other times of the year, a phenomenon known as the spring prediction barrier.
It’s getting hotter and hotter
In the United States, El Niño’s effects tend to peak during the winter, sending powerful storms into parts of California and along the southern United States that can pose a risk of flooding.
Upper atmospheric winds may also pick up speed across the tropical Atlantic Ocean in the fall. This increases wind shear, which can tear apart nascent tropical storms and hurricanes and impact the Atlantic hurricane season.
Additionally, strong El Niño events have also been associated with heat waves in the United States and other parts of the world.
Globally, El Niño is known to increase the likelihood of drought and heatwaves in Australia, and may also increase the risk of bushfires. Other regions prone to drought during El Niño include northern South America (including parts of the Amazon rainforest), south-central Africa, and India. El Niño can also produce excessive rainfall, and there are flood-prone areas outside the United States, including southeastern South America, the Horn of Africa, Iran, Afghanistan, and other parts of south-central Asia.
In terms of climate, El Niño tends to release vast amounts of heat stored in the oceans into the atmosphere, raising the Earth’s average surface temperature. If a strong El Niño does occur and persists into the winter, it is almost certain that either 2026 or 2027, or both, will set a new record for the warmest year since instrumental data began being collected in the 19th century.
The planet is already warming at an accelerating rate, and a strong El Niño event will accelerate the rate for at least a few years. If climate change is like climbing an escalator, with some years being warmer than others, then an El Niño year is the equivalent of jumping up and down that escalator, reaching short-lived record heights.
As a result of the last El Niño that was not a Super El Niño, 2024 is the current holder of the title of warmest year. The last Super El Niño occurred in 2015-2016, the others occurred in 1997-1998 and 1982-83. Super El Niño is not a technical designation by NOAA, but an unofficial definition used by some forecasters and media to refer to an extremely strong El Niño.
Meteorologists will be closely monitoring the rise in temperatures in the Pacific Ocean to see how strong El Niño will become. If the European model proves correct, it could even become the strongest El Niño on record.
