A long-anticipated and dramatic global climate shift has arrived, federal forecasters said June 11 as they confirmed the start of El Niño conditions.
The announcement also adds to mounting evidence suggesting this El Niño will be unusually strong, potentially supercharging droughts, heavy rainfall events and heat waves. Previous El Niños have led to some of the hottest years on record, such as the record-breaking worldwide average temperature in 2024.
El Niño is part of a larger climate cycle driven by the temperature of water in parts of the Pacific Ocean. The natural climate pattern affects weather planetwide, bringing a mixed bag of conditions across the globe.
The new forecast from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s Climate Prediction Center anticipates a “very strong” El Niño. It may grow to rival the strongest El Niño events in historical record dating back to 1950, said the climate center’s Michelle L’Heureux in an e-mail to USA TODAY.
Meanwhile, not all El Niño effects are sinister. The pattern is also expected to reduce hurricane activity in the Atlantic and could bring a milder winter (and lower heating bills) to millions of Americans.
World leaders have expressed concern about the prospect of droughts, heavy rainfall events and heat waves.
“The world must treat it as the urgent climate warning it is. El Niño conditions will pour fuel on the fire of a warming world,” said United Nations Secretary-General António Guterres in a video statement earlier in June.
A strong event could create ripple effects for months to come, and the new forecast says a strong event is increasingly likely.
“In NOAA’s latest update, we have a 63% chance of becoming “very strong” in the upcoming winter,” L’Heureux noted.
“There are 7 very strong events in our record, so this event has a decent chance of reaching that level,” she said. “There is still some uncertainty, with a 1-in-3 chance of this not being a very strong El Nino.”
While there’s no evidence that climate change increases the frequency or intensity of El Niño events, the World Meteorological Organization noted it can amplify the impacts. Given that water temperatures in the tropical Pacific are already as much as 10 degrees Fahrenheit above average, concern is rising at the U.N. that this El Niño could feed on that extra heat “and devastate vulnerable and unprepared communities worldwide.”
When federal forecasters confirmed El Niño conditions on June 11, they used data from satellites showing sustained changes in winds and water temperatures in the tropical Pacific Ocean.
Those temperatures briefly skyrocketed in the El Niño region during the first week in June to reach record levels for this time of year. They’ve fallen slightly but remained above previous records on June 9, according to a visualization by the Climate Reanalyzer at the University of Maine’s Climate Change Institute.
El Niño is a part of a climate cycle known by scientists as “El Niño – Southern Oscillation,” or ENSO. But it was originally recognized by fishermen off the coast of South America in the 1600s, with the appearance of unusually warm water in the Pacific Ocean around Christmas. The name means the Little Boy or Christ Child in Spanish.
When El Niño conditions aren’t present, the cycle can be in neutral or La Niña phases.
“While this year’s event started a bit later than the big El Niños of 2015 and 1997, it’s beginning to catch up,” Josh Willis, a sea level researcher at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, said in late May. “We’ll see how big it gets.”
Forecasters say it’s too soon to know specifics, and it will always be hard to determine El Niño’s exact impact on weather. But the climate pattern does have hallmark features that forecasters expect.
All isn’t necessarily doom and gloom, the climate center’s L’Heureux said. “Keep in mind that impacts related to El Niño are not necessarily concerning.”
“While it can increase the chance of seeing more extreme weather across parts of the globe, there are positives, such as potentially lower heating bills for the northern tier of the United States during the winter. The likely reduction of tropical cyclone activity over the Atlantic basin is also potentially beneficial.”
Unlike other weather events, El Niño provides advance notice, Frazier said.
“It’s one of the few events that we can actually kind of plan for six months in advance,” Frazier said. “There’s not a lot of other things in our weather forecasting world that give us that much lead time.”
(This story was updated to add new information.)
Dinah Voyles Pulver and Doyle Rice are national correspondents for USA TODAY, writing about hurricanes, violent weather and climate change. Reach her at dpulver@usatoday.com or @dinahvp on Bluesky or X and reach Doyle at drice@usatoday.com
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