This Year’s Record-Breaking El Niño in 3 Charts
Reported by Mira Rojanasakul and Chico Harlan for The New York Times
This year’s El Niño is already intense, and it’s not done growing. Scientists expect that by December, when El Niño events typically reach their peak, this one will wind up as the strongest in at least 80 years of precise record keeping. And perhaps as the most powerful in centuries.
The event will alter weather patterns across the planet and could drive an additional 49 million people into hunger, according to a projection by the United Nations’ World Food Program. It will also temporarily boost global temperatures that were already rising because of climate change.
El Niños are essentially anomalies in the tropical Pacific Ocean. Their magnitude is measured by how far temperatures there rise beyond the norm. Temperatures must jump 2 degrees Celsius (3.6 degrees Fahrenheit) above average to qualify as a Super El Niño. But this year’s event is expected to go even further, well exceeding the prior strong El Niños that began in 1997, 2015 and 2023.
It’s unusual to have three strong El Niños in 11 years. And scientists are divided about whether that run is just a coincidence, or whether climate change might be making El Niño events more frequent and intense.
An El Niño’s magnitude is measured in a vast rectangular zone of the Pacific that runs along the Equator, starting off the coast of South America. Most years, temperatures in that zone hit a peak of around 28 degrees Celsius (82 degrees Fahrenheit) in May and then gently decline through the Northern Hemisphere summer. But during an El Niño year, temperatures break from that pattern, and this year they are spiking like never before. In no other year on record have temperatures held above 29 degrees Celsius (84 degrees Fahrenheit) in July and August.
This warming is happening in an ocean that has been heating up for decades as it absorbs heat trapped by greenhouse gas emissions from human activity. The effects are not constrained to the Pacific. On Saturday, the daily global average sea surface temperature reached 21.1 degrees Celsius (70 degrees Fahrenheit), according to Europe’s Copernicus Climate Change Service, breaking the previous record set in March 2024.
The heat that builds up near the surface of the tropical Pacific eventually makes the entire planet warmer. The trend takes a while to materialize, but recent El Niños have led to annual global heat records in the year after they form. To that end, scientists broadly expect 2027 to be the hottest year humans have ever experienced. But the heat is altering the trajectory of 2026 as well. The first half of this year, while broadly hotter than in previous decades, generally did not approach the heat records set in 2024. But recent days in August have been warmer than comparable dates in any prior year.
