This year’s El Niño will be the strongest on record, threatening to unleash extreme weather across the globe and make 2027 the hottest recorded year by far, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s (NOAA) Climate Prediction Center forecasted in its latest report.
According Michelle L’Heureux, El Niño-Southern Oscillation (ENSO) team lead at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, stacked on top of long-term human-caused climate change, the temporary jolt will offer a glimpse of the heat the world can expect by the late 2030s.
L’Heureux explained that ENSO sets in when trade winds that blow from east to west temporarily ease up, allowing warm water which normally piles up in the western Pacific Ocean to slide back east and rise to the surface.
To further describe the expected situation, University of Miami climate scientist Emily Becker opined that the upshot of a severe El Niño would be hotter and drier conditions in some places, cooler and wetter in others.
“When those warmer-than-average surface temperatures last for a few months, they cause more storms and clouds over the region, which cause ripple effects through the entire global atmosphere,” Becker pointed out.
The climate expert enthused that some effects are already being felt as she cited as an example Indonesia’s long, intense dry season which has fed wildfires that burned hundreds of thousands of hectares of forests and other areas.
Based on the highly cited Climate Brink dashboard, which draws on NOAA’s satellite-and-buoy sea surface record, daily sea surface temperatures in the Niño 3.4 region—an imaginary box in the Pacific—are already running about 2.6 degrees Celsius above a rolling 30-year-average.
The dashboard also aggregates forecasts that put El Niño on course to peak at a 3.9 C anomaly this November—well above the 3 C anomaly detected in the 2015 El Niño.
Calculations by climate scientists indicate that El Niño will add a temporary 0.3 C on top of the long-term global warming trend, resulting in a 2027 temperature of 1.76 C above preindustrial levels—compressing into a single year as much warming as would otherwise be expected by 2037.
NOAA’s Pacific Marine Environmental Laboratory had a similar estimate, asserting that “it’s not inconceivable that 2027 may top out at 1.7 C above preindustrial levels,” if model forecasts bear out.
Amid the latest developments, NOAA in February adopted the Relative Oceanic Niño Index, which gauges warming in the Niño 3.4 region against warming across the whole tropical belt in order to try to better represent the ocean-atmosphere system driving ENSO impacts.
On that scale, the numbers run lower but the predicted ranking remains the same and NOAA puts the odds at 69 percent that this El Niño will be the strongest in its dataset going back to 1950.
