El Niño Is Heading Toward Exceptional Strength. Here's What to Expect.
The World Meteorological Organization warned on September 3, 2026, that the current El Niño event is on track to intensify to exceptional levels in the coming months and persist into early 2027, raising the risk of worsening droughts, floods, and extreme heat worldwide. The WMO said its forecasts show a nearly 100 percent likelihood that El Niño will continue through February — the strongest level of certainty the agency has ever expressed in an El Niño/La Niña update. WMO
El Niño is a natural climate pattern in which surface waters in the tropical Pacific warm above average, disrupting wind and rainfall patterns around the globe. It typically occurs every two to seven years and lasts nine months to a year, peaking between November and February. The WMO classifies El Niño events as weak, moderate, strong, or very strong, and expects the current event to reach the highest category. The agency reported exceptional ocean heat in the tropical Pacific as a key driver.
WMO chief Celeste Saulo said the event may be stronger than anything since monitoring began, describing it as "off the charts" relative to the data used for the past four decades. Saulo said El Niño will peak toward the end of 2026, though its downstream climate impacts will continue well into 2027. She also noted that if the record set by 2024 as the warmest year on record — driven partly by the 2023-24 El Niño — is broken, that should not come as a surprise. Al Jazeera
UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres said El Niño is being "supersized" before our eyes and that the planet is in uncharted, warming waters and the danger zone of extreme weather. For September through November, WMO forecasts indicate an increased likelihood of above-normal temperatures across almost all land areas, alongside what the agency called a "pronounced and classic atmospheric response" in rainfall patterns — meaning the rainfall disruptions scientists expect from El Niño are already materializing as predicted.
The trajectory of the current event has been visible in WMO guidance for months. A WMO update in June 2026 indicated an 80 percent likelihood of an El Niño event during June through August. By July, the WMO's Global Seasonal Climate Update noted rapid development from July through September, and a late-July statement confirmed that a strong El Niño was developing and expected to strengthen during August through October, with above-normal temperatures expected worldwide. WMO, June 2026
Carbon Brief, reporting in April 2026, found that the latest climate models gave a central (median) estimate of 2.2°C warming by September 2026, a level described as "super" El Niño territory. Carbon Brief also assessed that the strong El Niño puts 2026 on track for the second-warmest year. Carbon Brief
The near-100 percent forecast certainty is itself notable. The WMO has never expressed this level of confidence in an El Niño/La Niña update before, which reflects both the strength of the observed ocean-atmosphere coupling in the tropical Pacific — the feedback loop between warm ocean water and shifting atmospheric conditions — and the convergence of dynamical and statistical models on a prolonged event. The seasonal forecast window through February 2027 means the event would exceed the typical nine-to-twelve-month duration, overlapping with the Northern Hemisphere winter peak that historically amplifies El Niño's influence across the Americas, Southeast Asia, and the Indo-Pacific basin.
The broader context here is how this event differs from past El Niños. El Niño events redistribute heat already in the climate system; they do not add net energy. Think of it as a pot of water on a stove — the stove is the long-term warming trend, and El Niño is a swirl that pushes some of the deeper, stored heat to the surface. The combination of a very strong El Niño layered on top of already elevated baseline global temperatures is what sets this event apart from historical comparisons. The 2023-24 El Niño helped push 2024 to its record-warm status. The current event, should it reach the intensity the WMO projects, would add an additional layer of warming on top of a higher thermal starting point. Saulo's remark that the 2024 temperature record being broken "should not be a surprise" is a direct acknowledgment of that compounding dynamic.
What the WMO is signaling is that the margins for adaptation are narrowing precisely when the warming pressure is intensifying. A very strong El Niño can temporarily accelerate surface warming by releasing stored oceanic heat into the atmosphere, and the WMO's forecast of above-normal temperatures across nearly all land areas through the Northern Hemisphere autumn reflects that mechanism in action.
