Powerful El Niño, projected to be 2C warmer than normal, puts 2026 on track for second-warmest year
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Scientists have developed a new model purporting to skillfully predict El Niño and La Niña 15 months ahead of time.
The first three months of 2026 were the fourth warmest on record, despite weak La Niña conditions suppressing temperatures.
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The start of the year has also seen record-low sea ice cover in the Arctic.
Now, scientists expect the warming El Niño event predicted to arrive by early autumn to be especially strong.
Experts say this means 2026 has a 19 per cent chance of surpassing 2024 as the warmest year on record.
2026 may see a ‘super’ El Niño
Based on temperature datasets from five different research groups, environmental news and analysis website Carbon Brief predicts that 2026 is virtually certain to be one of the four warmest years on record – and likely to be the second-warmest on record.
Global temperatures are expected to rise throughout the year, particularly as autumn could see the arrival of a ‘super’ El Niño.
The warming phenomenon in the tropical Pacific shapes global weather patterns, and can power droughts, flooding and marine heat waves.
The most common method of predicting the nature of conditions is by measuring the temperature anomaly in the ‘Niño3.4’ region of the tropical Pacific.
Sustained sea surface temperatures in excess of 0.5°C indicate an El Niño event, temperatures above 1.5°C represent a strong El Niño event and temperatures above 2°C are often referred to as a ‘super’ El Niño event.
Carbon Brief says the latest climate models provide a median estimate of 2.2°C warming by September – a scenario which would put the world firmly in ‘super’ El Niño territory.
Warming is expected to build after September, as El Niño conditions generally peak between November and January.
Should a super event occur, it would “substantially increase the chance that 2027 will be the warmest year on record”, according to Carbon Brief.
How do scientists predict El Niño strength?
Accurately predicting how El Niño conditions will develop this early in the year has historically been difficult.
Scientists usually need a few more months before they can confidently forecast a strong or super event.
However, researchers from the University of Hawai'i at Mānoa published a recent study purporting to skillfully predict El Niño and La Niña 15 months ahead of time.
The paper, in Geophysical Research Letters, bases forecasts on observations of ocean surface temperature and height, without using complex climate models.
“Many of today’s leading forecast systems are either computationally expensive dynamical climate models, statistical models that rely on El Niño-Southern Oscillation (ENSO) knowledge built over decades of research, or AI approaches that require large amounts of training data and are often harder to interpret physically,” said lead author Yuxin Wang.
Instead, the researchers used two core “climate memories” discovered decades ago to create a data-driven, empirical model.
Sea level changes can reveal heat build-up in the tropical Pacific, which led pioneering oceanographer Klaus Wyrtki to use tide gauge observations to predict El Niño as early as the 1970s.
Furthermore, anomalies in global sea surface temperatures, even outside the tropical Pacific, contribute to El Niño or La Niña developing months later.
RelatedBy feeding historic data from these two observations into a computer model, the researchers tested to see if the system would have accurately predicted the Niño3.4 index in the past six decades.
“We found that it can predict El Niño and La Niña surprisingly well, with useful skill up to about 15 months ahead,” said Wang.
The model currently predicts the development of a strong El Niño, more than 2°C warmer than normal over the equatorial eastern Pacific, toward the end of this year.
“Accurately predicting ENSO more than a year in advance is important because it can provide early warning, allowing communities, governments, and resource managers to take actions and make adaptations to reduce the potential impacts from El Niño and La Niña,” Wang added.
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