In mid-June, climate scientists warned that this year's El Niño (just two years after the previous cycle) was strengthening, mainly in the Pacific Ocean. They predicted that the phenomenon could become the strongest in at least 150 years.
If the predictions are confirmed, the large amount of heat that will be released from the ocean into the atmosphere due to “El Niño”, combined with warming from human-caused climate change, is likely to make next year the warmest on record and at the same time create the conditions for extreme weather events in many regions of the world. The data were published by the scientific journal “Nature” in its analysis.
Meteorological services and researchers around the world are on alert, as when heat accumulated in the ocean is released into the atmosphere, it causes a chain reaction that affects rainfall, temperatures and even hurricane activity across the planet.
According to predictions from various climate models, the peak of this El Niño is expected to exceed the previous record by "a truly inconceivable margin," explains Zick Hausfather, a climatologist at Berkeley Earth, a nonprofit research organization in California.
This year's El Niño is strengthening at an unusually rapid pace and is expected to cause disruptions to everything from fishing to ski seasons. Not all of its effects are negative, as the dry southwestern United States is likely to experience more winter precipitation.
In addition to warming oceans, the winds that blow from east to west are also weakening. In 1997 and 2015 (the years in which El Niño was strongest) sea levels rose about 18 centimeters above average.
All of this data warns of significant changes in global weather patterns. Rainfall in the northwest Pacific could decrease, while the risk of drought increases for Indonesia and parts of southern Africa.
Combined with climate change, the chain reaction could push the average global temperature in 2027 up to 1.7 degrees Celsius above the pre-industrial average, to levels significantly higher than the 1.5 degrees Celsius limit around which the long-term goal of the Paris Agreement is formulated.
According to Justin Mankin, a climate researcher at Dartmouth College in Hanover, New Hampshire, the current situation shares many commonalities with future El Niños, which scientists predicted would be worsened by human-caused climate change later this century.
In its latest announcement, the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) assessed that there is a possibility of a "very strong" episode by the end of the year, while considering it almost certain that El Niño conditions will continue at least until April 2027.
The term "super El Niño" is not an official term from any meteorological agency, but scientists use it to describe a phenomenon in which temperatures rise at least 2 degrees Celsius above average.
Although there is no single, standardized interpretation, four El Niño episodes are considered to meet the characteristics of a "super El Niño": those of 1982-83, 1997-98, 2015-16, and 2023-24. ©LAPSI.al
