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This year's El Nino is set to become the strongest ever recorded, raising the risk of extreme weather worldwide and pushing 2027 toward becoming by far the hottest year on record, according to the head of long-range forecasting at the United Kingdom's Met Office, which issued the warning on Friday.
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, experts say.
El Nino is the warming phase of a natural cycle in the tropical Pacific known as the El Nino-Southern Oscillation (ENSO). It sets in when trade winds that blow from east to west temporarily ease up, allowing warm water that normally piles up in the western Pacific Ocean to slide back east and rise to the surface.
When those warmer-than-average surface temperatures last for a few months, they cause more storms and clouds over the region, triggering ripple effects across the global atmosphere, according to Emily Becker, a climate scientist at the University of Miami.
The result is hotter and drier conditions in some places, and cooler, wetter conditions in others. Indonesia's long, intense dry season, for example, has already fed wildfires that have burned hundreds of thousands of hectares.
"Stronger events mean that we can expect to see more of these expected El Nino impacts," Michelle L'Heureux, ENSO team lead at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA)'s Climate Prediction Center, stated, though she cautioned none are guaranteed.
Daily sea surface temperatures in the El Nino 3.4 region, an area of the eastern-central tropical Pacific used to measure El Nino's strength, are currently running about 2.6 degrees Celsius (4.7 degrees Fahrenheit) above a rolling 30-year average, according to the Climate Brink dashboard, which draws on NOAA's satellite-and-buoy sea surface record. Forecasts put El Nino on course to peak at a 3.9°C anomaly this Nov., well above the 3°C anomaly recorded during the 2015 El Nino.
This positions 2026 as a contender for the hottest year on record, currently held by 2024, and makes 2027 a near certainty for the top spot, since most of the heat impact is felt the following year.
According to climate scientists Zeke Hausfather and Andrew Dessler, El Nino will add a temporary 0.3°C on top of the long-term warming trend, pushing 2027 to 1.76°C above pre-industrial levels, compressing into a single year as much warming as would otherwise be expected by 2037.
"It's kind of a preview of the future," Dessler, a professor at Texas A&M University, stated. NOAA puts the odds at 69% that this El Nino will be the strongest in its dataset going back to 1950.
Scientists agree climate change increases El Nino's impacts. A warmer, greenhouse-gas-laden atmosphere holds more moisture, making El Nino-linked rains more extreme, while also drying out soils and deepening drought in affected regions.
There is less consensus on whether climate change itself triggers stronger El Ninos, though evidence is emerging. "Climate change may be amplifying the El Nino cycle itself," said Mike McPhaden, a senior scientist at NOAA's Pacific Marine Environmental Laboratory.
Warmer tropical seas make the winds that drive El Nino more responsive to the ocean, tightening the feedback between the two and allowing events to build faster, he explained.
McPhaden cited evidence from coral-based paleoclimate records, instrument readings dating back to the 19th century, and climate modeling, all of which suggest El Ninos may have grown about 10% stronger in amplitude over the past century.
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