The World Meteorological Organization says weather forecast today points to an El Nino event developing from the middle of this year, with high confidence that it will intensify in the months that follow. The pattern could become the strongest on record.
Chief of climate prediction Wilfran Moufouma Okia said the organization sees a high-confidence onset, while the Global Seasonal Climate Update shows sea-surface temperatures rising rapidly. The agency also cautioned that spring forecasts are harder to make accurately, even as the signal strengthens.
WMO Global Seasonal Climate Update
El Nino is a natural warming of patches of the equatorial Pacific that alters weather patterns worldwide, and the strongest episodes are called super El Ninos. The current forecast is drawing attention because the expected event could last around nine to 12 months, and El Nino typically appears every two to seven years.
Daniel Swain, a climate scientist at the California Institute for Water Resources, said the volume and intensity of subsurface warm water anomalies are about as large as seen in the historical record. He said, "One of the key building blocks to make it fully materialize is, in fact, occurring" and added, "We still don’t know exactly what’s going to happen. It’s not guaranteed it’ll be a super El Nino. But the potential is there for something genuinely remarkable."
Jeff Berardelli on rainfall
Jeff Berardelli, the chief meteorologist and climate specialist at WFLA-TV, said El Nino essentially redistributes heat on Earth. He said stronger conditions can bring stronger heat waves, worsening drought in some areas, and more intense floods in others, while also subduing the Atlantic hurricane season because heat in the Pacific outcompetes the Atlantic.
Berardelli said, "I think we’re going to see weather events that we’ve never seen in modern history before." He said places like the Caribbean will be extra dry this summer and likely have fewer tropical systems, leaving regions that depend on seasonal rainfall facing a different kind of risk than those watching hurricane counts.
Midyear onset
The immediate shift for readers is the timing: the event is expected to develop from the middle of this year, with the strongest uncertainty centered on how far the warming advances after that. For households, farms, and emergency planners, the practical question is not whether the pattern is building, but how quickly the signal translates into heat, rain, and storm changes across specific regions.
