Climate forecasters are warning that a rapidly developing El Niño in the equatorial Pacific has the ingredients to become the strongest such event in modern records, a “super El Niño” that would reorder global weather, worsen heat waves, deepen drought, and unleash fiercer floods across continents. The World Meteorological Organization (WMO) said Friday that sea-surface temperatures in the central and eastern Pacific are rising quickly and that models show further intensification in the months ahead. A key indicator — the volume and intensity of unusually warm water beneath the surface — is at or above the highest levels seen in the historical record, according to Daniel Swain, a climate scientist at the California Institute for Water Resources. Jeff Berardelli, chief meteorologist at WFLA-TV in Tampa, Florida, said the event could bring “weather events that we’ve never seen in modern history before.”
El Niño is a natural, cyclical warming of patches of the equatorial Pacific that alters global weather patterns, occurring every two to seven years and typically lasting nine to twelve months. The current subsurface heat, which has been moving east across the ocean and rising toward the surface, represents the initial phase of an El Niño. Swain said the size and strength of these warm water anomalies are what give forecasters confidence that a powerful event may be building. “One of the key building blocks to make it fully materialize is, in fact, occurring,” he said. “We still don’t know exactly what’s going to happen. It’s not guaranteed it’ll be a super El Niño. But the potential is there for something genuinely remarkable.”
Wilfran Moufouma Okia, chief of climate prediction at the WMO, said there is high confidence in the onset of El Niño followed by further intensification, though the agency cautioned that models have a harder time making accurate forecasts in the spring. The very strongest events are classified as “super El Niños.”
Berardelli explained that El Niño essentially redistributes heat on Earth. When the Pacific releases a large amount of stored heat into the atmosphere, it supercharges the climate system and “wreaks havoc weather-wise.” The extra heat will drive stronger heat waves, worsen drought in some areas, and add more moisture to the air, leading to more intense floods. Across the United States, this summer is expected to be hotter than normal with significant heat waves, and the Southwest may see more frequent daily thunderstorms, Berardelli said.
El Niño also suppresses Atlantic hurricane activity because the abundance of heat in the Pacific outcompetes the Atlantic, Berardelli added. The Caribbean is likely to be extra dry this summer and experience fewer tropical systems. In South America, forest degradation driven by wildfires, logging, and drought already affects about 40% of the Amazon, and a strong El Niño could worsen the damage in 2026.
The excess heat released by El Niño, combined with the steady warming caused by climate change, will push global temperatures to new highs, Swain said. “All indicators are, at this point, that the next year is going to be a pretty wild year from a global climate perspective,” he said. He expects record global warmth later this year, next year, or both.
Michael Mann, a climate scientist at the University of Pennsylvania, said that while El Niño temporarily boosts global temperatures for a year or two, it is essentially a “zero-sum game” because the pattern typically oscillates back to a cooling La Niña phase. “The thing to worry about is the longer-term, steady warming trend that will continue as long as people continue to burn fossil fuels,” Mann said.