A potentially strong El Niño weather pattern will likely emerge this summer and persist through the rest of the year, according to the latest official forecast by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.
Forecasters estimate there is a 62% chance that El Niño will emerge between June and August. El Niño occurs when trade winds weaken, allowing vast volumes of warm ocean water to move from the Eastern Pacific toward the Americas.
"Even though the evidence is still early, this could be a very significant event in 2026 and lingering into 2027," says Daniel Swain, climate scientist with the University of California Agriculture and Natural Resources.
A strong El Niño would drive up average global temperatures. The hottest years on record generally occur in years when El Niño is active, because El Niño occurs when the Eastern Pacific is hotter than usual.
"Its function in the global earth system is to release heat from the deeper oceans that has been temporarily stored there," Swain says. "El Niño allows that subducted heat to be unearthed."
That dynamic played out in a big way in 2023 and 2024, when a long, strong El Niño pattern helped shatter global temperature records. 2023 smashed the record for the hottest year ever recorded on Earth, only to be surpassed by temperatures in 2024.
"If a strong El Niño does develop, it'll boost temperatures in 2026 a bit, but it will have a particularly large effect on temperatures in 2027 and put that year on track to probably be the warmest year on record after 2024," says Zeke Hausfather, research scientist at Berkeley Earth and climate research lead at technology company Stripe.
El Niño, which is a natural cyclic fluctuation, is just one driver of such record-breaking heat. Human-caused global warming from burning fossil fuels is the main reason that the planet is warming. Even without El Niño, last year was in the top three hottest years on record.
El Niño also affects regional weather patterns around the world. The Southern United States often sees more rain and cooler temperatures, which can help control droughts and tamp down wildfire activity.
However, the Southwest is in the grip of such a severe drought that one year of wetter weather will not be enough to fully replenish reservoirs, according to a new analysis by the National Integrated Drought Information System. And the extra global heat from El Niño can drive more severe droughts in other parts of the world.
On the other side of the U.S., El Niño makes it harder for hurricanes to form in the Atlantic Ocean, so they often coincide with less severe hurricane seasons. However, El Niño offers limited protection, since it only takes one major storm making landfall to cause catastrophic damage, and climate change has caused temperatures in the Atlantic to soar, providing more fuel for storms that do form. And El Niño does nothing to temper storms that form in the Pacific.
Swain says El Niño's regional patterns are its most dangerous effects. "It does mean more heat waves and tangibly warmer temperatures, but maybe the more important thing is what it means for everything else: more energy for storms, heavier downpours, more intensive droughts, more extreme wildfires."
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