Dynamical models now assign a 90% chance of the 2026-2027 El Niño being an all-time record event, sending temperatures in the Pacific Ocean up to around 3.6 degrees Celsius (6.5 degrees Fahrenheit) above average, according to an analysis by Zeke Hausfather, a research scientist at Berkeley Earth and an author of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change's Seventh Assessment Report.
A strong El Niño doesn't guarantee more severe weather impacts. The current El Niño models are also imperfect predictions of what's to come, and we won't know the true nature of this El Niño event until it peaks, likely later this year. However, forecasters have been warning of potentially supercharged El Niño conditions for months, and as more data emerges, there are more reasons to prepare.
"These are striking forecasts," Emily Black, a professor of terrestrial processes and climate at the University of Reading and a senior scientist at the National Centre for Atmospheric Science in the U.K., told Live Science in an email. "El Niño forecasts always come with uncertainty, but the level of agreement between models at this time of year, combined with the observed warming already underway in the tropical Pacific, means this should be taken very seriously."
The International Rescue Committee, a humanitarian organization, has warned that the intense El Niño conditions threaten to unleash severe flooding and drought across East Africa and Asia, hitting some of the most vulnerable communities, Al Jazeera reported Tuesday (July 14).
During El Niño, warmer waters gather east of the equatorial Pacific, forcing the jet stream south. In the U.S., this typically brings warmer, drier conditions to the Northeast, while the Gulf Coast and Southeast experience an increased risk of flooding. Globally, the net result of the warmer waters is more heat in the atmosphere, on top of the temperature rise from human-driven global warming.
"This does not mean every impact can be attributed simply to El Niño or simply to climate change," Black added. "The two interact. El Niño can load the dice towards drought in some regions, flooding in others, marine heatwaves, disrupted monsoons and unusually high global temperatures. Climate change makes many heat extremes more severe and can intensify heavy rainfall because a warmer atmosphere can hold more moisture."
Residents wade through stagnant water over a flooded road at Kohoto estate in Naivasha, Kenya on November 17, 2025 (Image credit: Tony Karumba/AFP via Getty Images)
Hausfather's analysis reports that there's around a 90% chance that the current El Niño will be the strongest ever recorded, with data from multimodel forecasts suggesting that it may obliterate the previous record.
NOAA recognizes El Niño conditions when the eastern tropical Pacific Ocean is at least 0.5 C (0.9 F) warmer than the historical average, while wind, surface pressure and rainfall in the region are also consistent with El Niño conditions. The El Niño is then categorized as weak, moderate, strong or very strong. A very strong El Niño (above 2 C, or 3.6 F, warmer than the historical average) is often nicknamed a "super" El Niño, though it's not a scientific term.
This Sentinel-6 Michael Freilich satellite image captures the massive wave of warm water and higher-than-usual sea surfaces (red) that stretched across the Pacific on June 8, just a few days before El Niño was declared. (Image credit: Data for the map were acquired by the Sentinel-6 Michael Freilich satellite and processed by scientists at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL).NASA Earth Observatory/Lauren Dauphin)
In The Climate Brink Substack, Hausfather noted that the multimodel median for the event's peak is currently forecast at 3.6 C (6.5 F), or around 0.8 C (1.4 F) hotter than the prior record holder (2.75 C, set in the 2015-2016 El Niño event). Hausfather wrote that around 91% of ensemble members (individual computer models) have this El Niño exceeding the 2015-2016 record at their peak — around 77% likelihood in the newly introduced indices.
"It is certainly plausible that this could become a record-breaking El Niño, and the latest forecasts make that a real possibility rather than a remote one," Black said. "However, I would still be cautious about treating any probability estimate as a certainty."
"Impacts are what matter"
The most severe El Niño events have left a trail of devastation in their wake. For example, the 2015-2016 El Niño saw a record-breaking hurricane season in the central North Pacific, severe drought in the Caribbean and Ethiopia, and, of course, abnormally hot global temperatures, according to NOAA's Climate.gov. If the forecasts pan out, the current El Niño will match or exceed the 2015-2016 event, as well as an even more infamous super El Niño that occurred between 1877 and 1878, long before modern recordkeeping of El Niño began in 1950.
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The El Niño-Southern Oscillation cycle triggers a warm El Niño and then a cold La Niña roughly every two to seven years, with each phase typically lasting around nine to 12 months. Carbon Brief has predicted that 2026 is likely to be the second-warmest year on record, with the intensifying El Niño increasing the likelihood that 2027 will be the warmest year ever recorded.
"Records are compelling, but impacts are what matter," Black said. "Even if it falls just short of a record, a very strong El Niño can still have serious consequences. Finally, these forecasts are concerning, but they are also useful: they give societies time to anticipate possible impacts and act before the worst effects are felt."
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