This year’s El Niño is forecasted to be the strongest in terms of sea surface temperatures since 1950, when the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) started recording El Niños. And because El Niño began earlier this year, it’s been causing severe weather changes and even starvation globally.
El Niño is a weather phenomenon where trade winds, steady and reliable winds that blow across the Earth’s equatorial region from east to west, weaken. Trade winds normally push warm water toward Asia and pull cold water near South America. During El Niño, without strong winds to push it, the warm water flows back toward the coast of Americas. The warm waters cause the Pacific jet stream to move south from its original position, making Northern U.S. and Canada drier and warmer while the Southeast becomes wetter than usual.
“At the very least, it’s going to be as bad as the worst we’ve seen before, possibly much worse,” said Steven Paton, who works at the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute in Panama.
“What we’ll see in 2027 is a sneak peek of what the new normal will be in 2035,” said Zeke Hausfather, a climate scientist at Berkeley Earth. “We’ll see things that have never happened before in our history in terms of temperature, drought conditions, extreme heat.”
