On June 11, after weeks of uncertainty, NOAA declared that El Niño was already here and that everything seemed to point to a progressive intensification as winter approached. It is true that the probability that the warm phase will be ‘very strong’ is still at 65%, but it is also true that the models insistently indicate that it will be one of the most intense in the last 75 years.
Now, in addition, we have an incontestable fact: it is not only that the central and eastern Pacific is much warmer than the historical average, but that the temperature in El Niño 3.4 (the one used by scientists to monitor, declare and measure the intensity of the phenomenon) is at levels never seen before.
What do we talk about when we talk about ENSO, El Niño and all these things? What we know as the El Niño-Southern Oscillation (or ENSO) is a cyclical (although somewhat irregular) climate phenomenon that has large effects on the global climate. During the warm phase (during El Niño itself), the lack of trade winds to cool the surface causes the temperature of the Pacific waters to skyrocket.
And that, precisely that, disrupts all the Earth’s weather systems, causing the thermometers of the entire planet to skyrocket. As explained from AEMET“El Niño, through different atmospheric teleconnections, gives rise to drier than normal conditions in certain parts of the world; while in others it causes more precipitation. Some countries have to deal with significant droughts and others with torrential rains.”
What this record implies and what it does not imply. This fact is incontestable, but there is a catch. It is true that the absolute temperature of the equatorial Pacific is at record levels, but technically speaking that is not what defines the intensity of El Niño.
In fact, this last year, the index monitored by ENSO has been changed to prevent climate change (which, ‘naturally’, raises the average water temperature in the area) from causing us to confuse “a very hot Pacific” with a “very intense El Niño.”
What defines it is the anomaly between the Niño-3.4 region and the rest of the surrounding regions. Right now that anomaly is still low, but considering how quickly it has appeared, it is exactly what we would expect.
And why do we tell this? Because the situation is complicated. El Niño of 2023-24 was one of the five strongest on record and contributed to 2024 breaking the global temperature record. And we are talking about a ‘normal’ event.
The super Children of 1982-83, 1997-98 and 2015-16 left severe global impacts, victims in the order of 24,000 people and economic losses exceeding 30 billion dollars. It is true that we have improved a lot, but that is what we expose ourselves to. We must not forget that the period April 2025-March 2026 is already the warmest twelve months ever measured.
Image | AMETSE
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