A brewing climate powerhouse

With sharks on the move, sea surface temperatures skyrocketing, and one tropical system after another in the eastern Pacific, signs of a potentially historic El Niño are emerging. The climate phenomenon is expected to reach unprecedented strength later in 2026, according to forecasts reported by Phys.org and USA Today.

Indonesia's long, intense dry season has already fed wildfires that have burned hundreds of thousands of hectares. As Phys.org notes, this year's El Niño is on track to be the strongest on record, threatening to unleash extreme weather across the globe and potentially making 2027 the hottest year on record.

The term "El Niño" refers to the warming phase of a natural cycle in the tropical Pacific known as the El Niño-Southern Oscillation (ENSO). It sets in when trade winds that blow from east to west temporarily ease up, allowing warm water that normally piles up in the western Pacific to slide east and rise to the surface. When those warmer-than-average surface temperatures last for a few months, they cause more storms and clouds over the region, which cause ripple effects through the entire global atmosphere, explained Emily Becker, a climate scientist at the University of Miami, in an interview with AFP reported by Phys.org.

The upshot is hotter and drier conditions in some places and cooler, wetter conditions in others.

The Climate Brink dashboard, drawing on NOAA's satellite-and-buoy sea surface record, reports daily sea surface temperatures in the Niño 3.4 region currently about 2.6°C above a rolling 30-year average. The dashboard aggregates forecasts that put El Niño on course to peak at a 3.9°C anomaly this November, which would surpass the 3°C anomaly detected in the 2015 El Niño.

NOAA in February adopted the Relative Oceanic Niño Index (RONI) to better represent the ocean-atmosphere system driving ENSO impacts. The agency puts the odds at 69% that this El Niño will be the strongest in its dataset going back to 1950.

Naming the beast

The event's potential strength has inspired a flurry of colorful, descriptive terms across social media posts, blogs, and even news stories. "Monster," "mega," "mind-blowing," and even "flamethrower" have appeared in posts and headlines, according to USA Today.

Grasping for a catchy description seems only natural. We name fires and hurricanes. We've debated naming winter storms. The intense 2015-2016 El Niño was widely dubbed "Godzilla," as people struggled to compare it to the very strong El Niño in 1997-1998. That nickname even later emerged in scientific papers.

And yet, scientists have consistently said the appropriate term for this El Niño is simply "very strong." The description comes from an official classification from NOAA, based on the three-month average that categorizes El Niño as weak, moderate, strong, or very strong.

Even so, "very strong" doesn't have quite the same cache as a "Cat 5 hurricane" or an "EF-5" tornado. That leaves meteorologists, social media users, and journalists reaching for adjectives to describe the event. "Super" is the description most often being used, but that has prompted reminders from science communicators who say at the very least it shouldn't be "Super" with a capital S because it's not an official NOAA term.

Humans tend to want to name and compare historic weather events, said Adam Rainear, an associate professor of communication and media at West Chester University of Pennsylvania. It makes it easier to understand and compare events.

As the Pacific heats up this summer, the term "super" has grown on some scientists who were uneasy with the word earlier in the summer. Becker, the University of Miami researcher, said that especially if this event meets or exceeds peak levels of previous events, we may need new language to differentiate it.

Michael Mann, director of the Penn Center for Science, Sustainability & the Media, told USA Today that it looks like this could potentially be the largest El Niño event on record.

But not everyone agrees on the need for new terminology. Michael McPhaden, a retired NOAA senior scientist, said there have been three extreme El Niño events in the past 50 years—1982-83, 1997-98, and 2015-16—and he doesn't think a new category is needed. He noted that having three major El Niños in a decade is not something seen in the previous 150 years of the historical instrumental record.

A preview of the future

Stacked on top of long-term human-caused climate change, the temporary jolt will offer a glimpse of the heat the world can expect by the late 2030s, experts say.

According to calculations by climate scientists Zeke Hausfather and Andrew Dessler, El Niño will add a temporary 0.3°C on top of the long-term global warming trend, resulting in a 2027 temperature of 1.76°C above preindustrial levels. Andrew Dessler, professor at Texas A&M, told AFP that this is "kind of a preview of the future."

Mike McPhaden, senior scientist at NOAA's Pacific Marine Environmental Laboratory, said it's not inconceivable that 2027 may top out at 1.7°C above preindustrial levels if model forecasts bear out.

Stronger El Niño events mean we can expect to see more of these expected impacts, said Michelle L'Heureux, ENSO team lead at NOAA's Climate Prediction Center, though she cautioned that none are guaranteed.

Climate change amplifies El Niño's impacts, and there is evidence it may be amplifying the El Niño cycle itself. Our greenhouse-gas-warmed atmosphere holds more moisture, so El Niño-linked rains can turn more extreme. Warmer tropical seas make the winds that drive El Niño more responsive to the ocean, tightening the feedback and letting events build faster. McPhaden cited evidence from the paleorecord and instrument readings suggesting El Niños may have increased in amplitude by about 10% over the past century.