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2026 Super El Niño · The Climate Translation

0:00
Earlier this year, the tropical Pacific was still emerging from La Niña.
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Now just a few months later, something remarkable is happening.
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El Niño is strengthening so quickly that NOAA says there's now more than a 90% chance
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it will become very strong this fall and winter.
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We've talked about El Niño before on this podcast.
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We've broken down the trade winds and the ocean currents and the atmospheric circulation
0:38
that make this natural cycle work.
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This year's El Niño is special, however, because it could rival in strength one of the
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deadliest climate disasters of the 1800s.
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So what happens when an event so powerful meets the world of 2026?
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Welcome back to the podcast, I'm Dr. Mac and this is the Climate Translation.
1:09
To understand how we got here, we need to rewind the Pacific Ocean by about a year.
1:16
During much of 2025, the tropical Pacific was experiencing La Niña.
1:22
If you remember from episode 10, the Pacific Seasaw, La Niña strengthens the trade winds
1:28
that normally blow from east to west along the equator.
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Those stronger winds push the warm surface water towards Indonesia and Australia, and over
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time that warm water begins piling up in the western Pacific.
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By early 2026, La Niña was fading, but the heat it had helped collect in the western
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Pacific was still there.
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In fact, NOAA's Climate Prediction Center was already watching a large area of unusually
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warm water beneath the surface of the equatorial Pacific.
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Then the winds began to change.
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During El Niño development, meteorologists often look for what they call Westerly Wind
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Bursts.
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These are periods when the usual Easterly Trade winds weaken or temporarily reverse, allowing
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winds to blow from west to east along the equator, and those wind bursts can push the
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stored warm water eastward.
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But the water doesn't simply slide across the surface.
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Some of that energy travels through the ocean as something called an equatorial Kelvin wave.
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You can think of it as a broad pulse moving below the surface, and it carries unusually
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warm water thousands of miles towards South America.
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NOAA monitors these waves using satellites and a network of buoys stretched across the
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tropical Pacific, and by the spring of 2026, those instruments were seeing a powerful
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warm pulse moving east.
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Then April brought something unusual.
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A rare pattern of three tropical cyclones developed on opposite sides of the equator.
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Cyclones Maila and Vaianu formed in the South Pacific, while Super Typhoon Sinlaku developed
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north of the equator.
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The Climate Adaptation Center highlighted this unusual arrangement in May, using data from
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NOAA and Columbia University's International Research Institute for Climate and Society.
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The circulation around these storms and the fact that they were basically on opposite sides
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of the equator helped to produce a strong burst of western winds across the tropical
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Pacific, and that gave that warm water another shove eastward.
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The cyclones didn't suddenly create El Niño.
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NOAA was already seeing the ingredients coming together before they formed.
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The subsurface Pacific had been warming for months, and westerly wind anomalies were
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beginning to appear, but that cyclone pattern in April appeared to have strengthened a process
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that was already underway.
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And once that warm water began reaching the central and eastern Pacific, another process
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started taking over.
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It's called the Bjerknes Feedback.
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Warmer surface water weakens the normal trade winds.
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Weaker trade winds allow more warm water to move east, and that reduces cold water moving
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upward near South America.
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The surface warms even more, and that further weakens the winds.
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At that point, the Pacific begins reinforcing its own change.
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By April, NOAA was giving only about a one-and-four chance that the developing Niño would become strong.
5:06
Four months later, that picture has changed dramatically.
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That shove became a swing, and now scientists are asking, just how far this Pacific see
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saw may go.
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To understand why scientists are taking the possibility of an extreme Niño seriously,
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it helps to go back about 150 years.
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In 1877 and 1878, the Pacific experienced one of the strongest Niño events scientists
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have ever been able to reconstruct.
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Now we don't have satellite measurements or a network of ocean buoys from the 1800s,
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so there is more uncertainty than there is with modern events.
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In 2020, a NOAA-led team, headed by climate scientist Boyin Huang, look closely at the
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available sea surface temperature records from that period.
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Their reconstruction suggests that parts of the tropical Pacific may have warmed by about
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three and a half degrees Celsius above normal.
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If that estimates correct, the 1877-78 event may have been stronger than the major El Niño's
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of 1982, 1997, and 2015.
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But the historical measurements are sparse enough that scientists can't say with certainty
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that that was the strongest El Niño ever.
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What we do know is what happened around it.
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Between 1875 and 1878, enormous areas of Asia, Africa, South America and Australia experienced
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severe drought.
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A 2018 study led by climate scientist Deepti Singh, with researchers from Washington State
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University, Columbia University's Earth Observatory and NASA's Goddard Institute for Space
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Studies, as well as the University of California Riverside, reconstructed what they called the
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Great Drought.
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Their results were published in the Journal of Climate.
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They found that Asia experienced some of the most severe drought conditions of the last
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800 years.
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Rainfall failed across parts of India.
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Northern China endured years of extreme dryness.
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Drought struck Brazil and portions of Africa, Southeast Asia and Australia, and crops
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failed across enormous areas.
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The human consequences were staggering.
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Historical estimates suggest somewhere between 12 and 29 million people died in India.
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Other 19 to 30 million may have died in China.
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Around 2 million died in Brazil.
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Across the entire event, the death toll exceeded 50 million people likely.
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That's about 3% of the world's population at that time.
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El Niño didn't cause the death toll directly.
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In fact, researchers found that the drought began in some places before El Niño fully developed
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and lasted after a weekend.
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The Indian Ocean and Atlantic Ocean were also behaving unusually, and that helped strengthen
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in an extend drought in some regions.
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And the drought alone doesn't automatically create famine.
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The climate caused the crops to fail, but what happened next depended on people.
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In some regions, grain was available but difficult to transport.
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Food prices increased beyond what poor families could afford.
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Traditional systems for storing food and water, weekend, and in colonial India, grain continued
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to be exported to England, while millions of local people were starving.
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The weather created the crisis.
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The human systems determined how deadly that crisis became.
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And that is what makes this comparison with 2026 so interesting.
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Because if another El Niño approaches the scale of the event in 1877, it will be entering
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a completely different world.
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So, if this El Niño approaches that same strength today, would tens of millions of people die?
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Probably not for the same reasons.
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The world of 2026 is very different from the world of the 19th century.
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Let's start with agriculture.
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Farmers today produce much more food from the same amount of land.
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We have irrigation.
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We have higher yielding crops and drought tolerant varieties.
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We have fertilizers, modern pest control, and satellite forecasts can warn farmers months
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in advance that rainfall patterns may be changing.
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According to the United Nations Food and Agricultural Organization, global agricultural
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production has grown faster than both consumption and population since the 1980s.
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And right now, global grain inventories are strong.
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India, for example, has accumulated enormous rice reserves.
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Brazil has become one of the world's largest exporters of soybeans and corn.
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Russia has become a major supplier of wheat.
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So if drought destroys a harvest in one country, food can potentially come from somewhere else.
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That simply wasn't possible on anything close to today's scale back in 1877.
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Back then, if the monsoon failed and crops died, many communities depended heavily on whatever
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food could be grown nearby.
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Today grain can travel thousands of miles by rail and truck and container ship.
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A wheat shortage in one region can be replaced with wheat from another continent. In that
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sense globalization has made us more resilient.
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But there's another side to that connection, because the same system that allows food to
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move around the world also allows the climate shock to move around the world.
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Maybe you don't live anywhere near Vietnam, but if El Niño brings drought to Southeast
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Asia and damages the coffee crop, you may be eventually noticing it in the price of your
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coffee at the grocery store.
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West Africa produces about half the world's cocoa.
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If rainfall there becomes unreliable, chocolate prices can respond thousands of miles away.
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Poor harvests in India or Thailand can affect sugar markets.
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Droughts can lower rivers and interfere with ships carrying grain.
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And those problems can occur while the food system is already dealing with wars, fertilizer
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prices, fuel costs, and disruptions to major shipping routes.
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So the modern system gives us more options, but it also gives climate disruptions more
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pathways to travel.
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And abundance doesn't necessarily mean everyone can afford what's available.
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And that's important to remember, the United Nations World Food Programme warned in August
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that a very strong El Niño could push nearly 49 million additional people into acute food
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insecurity across 45 particularly vulnerable countries by the end of 2027.
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That does not mean that 49 million people are going to starve, but it's a projection
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of increased risk.
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And much of that risk falls on places already dealing with poverty, conflict, displacement
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or fragile food systems.
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So 2026 is not 1877.
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We can forecast El Niño.
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We can watch cross from satellites.
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We can move food across oceans.
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We can prepare before the harvest fails.
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But we've also built a world on where the price of the breakfast in Georgia can be connected
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to rainfall and Vietnam.
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Cocoa trees in Ghana, or a river level in Brazil.
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The climate shock may begin locally.
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The consequences no longer have to stay here.
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So where does that leave us as we move into the fall of 2026?
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Right now the Pacific is still warming.
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In late August, NOAA's Climate Prediction Center reported that the sea surface temperatures
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in parts of the eastern equatorial Pacific were already more than three degrees Celsius
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above normal.
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And more heat is sitting beneath the surface.
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In some locations, NOAA has measured subsurface water temperatures as much as 10 degrees Celsius
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above average.
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And the atmosphere is responding.
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The trade winds have weakened.
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Rainfall is beginning to shift eastward across the tropical Pacific.
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The ocean and atmosphere are now working together in a fully developed El Niño.
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NOAA currently says there's a 90% or better chance that this will become a very strong event
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during the fall and winter of 2026 and 2027.
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And for October through December, forecasters are estimating a 69% chance that it will exceed
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every El Niño in NOAA's modern record going back to 1950.
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But even a historic El Niño is not a weather forecast.
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It changes the odds.
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But it doesn't write the script.
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The world meteorological organization is already expecting the growing El Niño to shift
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rainfall patterns around the world.
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Parts of Southeast Asia, Australia, and Southern Africa often become more vulnerable to drought.
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Parts of South America may experience heavier rainfall and flooding.
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Fisheries across the western coast of South America will struggle as warm surface water
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suppresses the cold nutrient-rich upwelling that normally supports marine life.
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And agriculture is already watching closely.
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Coffee growers in Vietnam and Indonesia are concerned about heat and reduced rainfall.
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Cocoa production in West Africa may be vulnerable to changing weather patterns, and sugar crops
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in India and Thailand may be affected.
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But here in the United States, the strongest signal may take a little longer to appear.
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NOAA's August seasonal outlook suggested that the effects of El Niño will become increasingly
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noticeable as we move from fall to winter.
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For September through November, weather than normal conditions are favored from parts
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of the southwest and to the central and southern plains, with another wetter area across the
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southeast.
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But NOAA also points out that the fall season is a difficult one to predict.
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Even very strong El Niños have produced very different autumn weather patterns.
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By winter, the picture may become clearer.
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A stronger southern storm track becomes more likely.
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Above normal precipitation is increasingly favored across California, the southern U.S.,
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and much of the east coast.
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At the same time, warmer than normal conditions will be likely across the northern United States.
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That doesn't mean California is going to flood, and it doesn't mean the southeast is going
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to have a stormy winter every week, and it certainly doesn't mean that every location
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is going to experience a classic El Niño pattern.
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These are just changes in probability.
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But when an El Niño becomes strong, the probabilities begin leaning harder in one direction.
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There's another part of this story we may not fully see until next year.
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El Niño releases heat stored in the Pacific Ocean back into the atmosphere, and this
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event is developing in a world where the ocean temperatures are already unusually high
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because of long-term global warming.
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The British meteorological office told Reuters that 2027 could challenge the hottest years
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ever measured globally.
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So we're not simply watching another swing of that Pacific seesaw.
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We're watching an unusually powerful natural climate event unfold on top of a warmer planet.
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We know where some of those risks are likely to increase.
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We know much more than people did in 1877, and for the first time in history, we can watch
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an event of this magnitude develop months before it reaches its peak.
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El Niño has always been part of the Earth's climate system.
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What makes this one different is the scale of the event.
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The speed at which it developed and the world it's entering.
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In 1877, people experienced the consequences of an extreme climate event with almost no
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warning and very few ways to respond.
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Today we can watch the Pacific change in real time.
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We can track the heat beneath the surface.
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We can forecast the shifting odds months in advance.
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And we can move food, money, and resources around the world in ways that would have been
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unimaginable 150 years ago.
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That gives us something people in 1877 did not have, time to prepare.
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I'm Dr. Mac, and this has been the Climate Translation.
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If you have a question about the climate you've been too afraid to ask, or if you have
18:08
a different opinion, I want to hear from you.
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I can use your viewpoints in future episodes.
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You can reach me at theclimatetranslation at gmail.com.
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I'll see you next time.