This year’s El Niño weather event could be the “strongest in a lifetime,” weather experts have warned
That's due to unusually warm sea surface temperatures in the Pacific Ocean. This natural climate pattern occurs when east-to-west trade winds weaken, allowing warm water to shift eastward.
This is what fuels more storms and clouds over the region that can cause ripple effects through the global atmosphere - and the U.S. is no exception.
But AccuWeather Lead Long-Range Meteorologist Paul Pastelok said whether this El Niño breaks records or not, "it is about the impacts and the impacts will not change either way.”
The El Niño is already impacting weather in the U.S., stymying this year’s Atlantic hurricane production.
Expected to last through next year, the pattern should bring lingering heat through the fall months in northern and eastern states.
And it’s projected to send drenching storms across the southern swath of the country while the Atlantic stays quiet.
During the winter, El Niño could bring snow, sleet and freezing rain to the Southeast and southern Plains.
And Florida could see more thunderstorms than usual, while other parts of the Gulf Coast see less, according to CNN meteorologist Mary Gilbert.
Unfortunately, after the worst spring drought on record, any resulting snowpack is anticipated to provide little relief for the West’s decades-long water crisis.
“Even one big year is not going to save us,” John Berggren, a policy manager at environmental nonprofit Western Resource Advocates, told WIRED. “It might be a sigh of relief, but we'll be right back in it.”
Next year’s forecast is murkier, but temperatures could soar, and federal forecasters said last week that there is a 90 percent chance the 2026-2027 El Niño will reach the highest strength level.
There are four different strength levels, ranging from “weak” to “very strong.”
El Niño is the warm phase of the climate pattern known as the El Niño Southern Oscillation, which regulates global climate. These events occur every 2-7 years.
The last time the El Niño was this strong was in 1877, when a global famine killed more than 50 million people.
“Simultaneous multiyear droughts similar to those in the 1870s could happen again,” Deepti Singh, an associate professor at Washington State University, told The Washington Post in May.
“What is different now is that our atmosphere and oceans are substantially warmer than they were in the 1870s, which means the associated extremes could be more extreme,” she said.
How much human-caused climate change plays a role here is an ongoing debate.
But it’s clear that there are higher temperatures and stronger storms now due to climate change. This past July was the warmest on record.
“What we’ll see in 2027 is a sneak peek of what the new normal will be in 2035,” Zeke Hausfather, a climate scientist at Berkeley Earth, a nonprofit research organization, told The New York Times. “We’ll see things that have never happened before in our history in terms of temperature, drought conditions, extreme heat.”
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