The World Meteorological Organization said Tuesday that El Niño has an 80% chance of forming before September and a 90% chance before November, setting up a swing in weather patterns that could quickly shape rain, drought and heat across much of the world.
The timing matters because forecasters say the Pacific is already edging toward the conditions that define the El Niño–southern oscillation, with sea surface temperatures in parts of the ocean approaching thresholds in late April to mid-May and the atmospheric component also lining up with development. Celeste Saulo, the WMO chief, said the spread among models remains wide, with some showing no strong El Niño at all while others point in the opposite direction.
That uncertainty is why the agency stopped short of endorsing warnings that the coming event could be the strongest this century, even though most models still point to at least a moderate episode and possibly a strong one. The WMO said unusually high temperatures are forecast in nearly all parts of the planet over the next three months, and it warned of a greater probability of extreme rain and drought if the pattern locks in.
Those effects are not evenly distributed. Scientists usually link El Niño to heavier rain in parts of South America, the southern US, the Horn of Africa and central Asia, while drier conditions are more often associated with Central America, northern South America, the Caribbean, Australia, Indonesia and parts of south Asia. Warm water in the central and eastern Pacific can also feed hurricanes there, even as it tends to suppress them in the Atlantic basin.
The warning lands less than a year after the last El Niño, in 2023-24, one of the five strongest on record. That event helped drive a scorching hot 2024 that broke global temperature records, and the WMO is now saying the next phase could add more heat to a planet already running unusually warm. António Guterres said the world must treat El Niño as an urgent climate warning, adding that it pours fuel on the fire of a warming world and that its impacts cross borders with devastating speed.
Gareth Redmond-King said the next El Niño could be devastating for many farmers and described the risk as a question of life or death for far too many people. The broader concern is that another El Niño could arrive just as weather systems are already primed for extremes, turning a global temperature problem into a food and disaster problem for some of the places most exposed to swings in rain and heat.
The WMO also rejected the label super El Niño, but it did not rule out a significant one. The real test now is whether the Pacific crosses into El Niño conditions before September or before November, and how fast the atmosphere and oceans deepen from there over the next several months.
