The El Niño climatic phenomenon, synonymous with droughts, floods and record temperatures around the world, began “during the last month”, the American Oceanic and Atmospheric Observing Agency (NOAA) announced on Thursday June 11.
The agency estimates a 63% chance of a very strong event between November and January, which would rank it among the most intense episodes on record since measurements began in 1950. El Niño is a natural climate phenomenon that warms surface temperatures in the central and eastern equatorial Pacific, causing global changes in wind, pressure and precipitation patterns.
In the so-called “Dry Corridor” region, a region covering parts of Guatemala, Honduras, El Salvador and Nicaragua, the return of El Niño is raising fears of a halving of precipitation and fueling fears of famine. In East Africa, it could “hit communities already damaged by the droughts and floods of recent years,” predicted Mohamed Adow.
The phenomenon is natural but adds to a climate already warmed by human activities, which makes us fear the worst. While each El Niño is different, historically the phenomenon causes or intensifies droughts in certain regions of the Amazon, Central America, Indonesia and Australia, monsoon disruptions in India and torrential rains in eastern Africa. Overall precipitation changes across the tropics.
Fears for 2027
“El Niño conditions will add fuel to the fire of a warming planet. The impacts will be even stronger and felt even further. They will cross borders at devastating speed,” UN Secretary General Antonio Guterres warned in a video in early June.
The phenomenon will peak this winter. It usually lasts nine to twelve months. Like NOAA, world weather experts, based on current temperatures in the Pacific, have been increasingly convinced for several weeks that the 2026 episode will be very strong, perhaps historic.
“The odds lean strongly in favor of a moderate to strong, or probably strong to potentially unprecedented, episode at this point,” the director of Europe’s Copernicus climate observatory, Carlo Buontempo, said on Wednesday.
It generally reaches its peak at the end of the year. Then ocean heat slowly dissipates and can continue to raise global temperatures the following year, leading many climate scientists to fear that 2027 will break the record for the hottest year on record.
