California's Central Valley experienced heavy flooding in 2023, also an El Niño year, and this year's El Niño is forecast to be far worse.Patrick T. Fallon/AFP via Getty
This story was originally published by WIRED and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.
The world’s leading weather organization is sounding the alarm about this year’s super El Niño, issuing its most certain forecast in the history of the organization.
In an update issued early Thursday, the World Meteorological Organization predicted a “nearly 100% likelihood” that the El Niño will last through February. The strong language from the WMO—the UN’s weather and climate agency—underlies just how historic this El Niño is shaping up to be.
“This is the first time that a WMO El Niño/La Niña Update has been so unequivocal,” the agency says, noting that certainty reflects “the strong agreement within WMO’s extensive network.”
“This is probably one of the larger, if not the largest, climate events…that anybody alive is potentially ever experiencing.”
El Niño is a naturally occurring weather phenomenon defined by warmer-than-normal ocean temperatures in the eastern tropical Pacific, a pattern that disrupts weather patterns around the world. Scientists have been warning since the start of the year that a particularly strong El Niño was set to develop. The latest forecasts indicate it will be the strongest on record by a wide margin, and impacts are already being felt throughout the world—and they’re likely to intensify in the coming months.
“El Niño is being supersized before our eyes,” UN Secretary-General António Guterres said in a statement. “The science leaves no room for doubt: The planet is in uncharted waters, and those waters are heating up. Sea surface temperatures are rising, temperatures keep climbing, and the world is in the danger zone of extreme weather.”
In addition to affecting regional weather, El Niño also tends to bump up the global average temperature by roughly 0.1 to 0.2 degrees Celsius (0.2 to 0.4 degrees Fahrenheit) by releasing heat into the atmosphere. But this year’s iteration could provide an even bigger boost. The intensity of this El Niño means this year is likely to be the hottest on record; because it takes a while for the added heat to work through the climate system, 2027 is forecast to be even hotter.
This extra warming is a red alert when compounded on top of the warming caused by manmade climate change. The UN warned in a separate report this week that the world will likely cross 1.5 degrees C of warming over the next few years.
Daniel Swain, a climate scientist with the University of California Agriculture and Natural Resources research network, says this El Niño will be so big, “with consequences that are so large, I’m not sure we fully understand them.”
The intensity of the El Niño, Swain says, means that it may cause unexpected and extreme weather, and he cautions against making certain predictions about what, exactly, is going to happen over the next year. But the impacts, he says, will almost certainly be massive.
“This is probably one of the larger, if not the largest, climate events—aside from long-term warming, which really isn’t a singular event—that anybody alive is potentially ever experiencing,” he says. “That’s a very big deal. And I think there’s certainly going to be dramatic outcomes from this.”
While the El Niño won’t reach its full strength for another few months, the world has already seen some impacts: The US just lived through the hottest summer on record, and the heat was almost certainly juiced up by El Niño. Regions that are typically dry during El Niño have also seen drought emerge. In Sudan, low water levels in the Nile are exacerbating a yearslong hunger crisis, while Puerto Rico has turned to water rationing due to dry conditions and infrastructure failures. Fisheries in the eastern Pacific have also been thrown into disarray by the hotter-than-normal waters there.
“The race now is between rising risks and our commitment to take climate action and protect people,” Guterres said in the release. “We must win that race.”
