Niño

Since mid-2025, we had no news on the front: the equatorial Pacific has been governed for months by a tremendously weak, decaffeinated and boring La Niña. But things end. And this La Niña is, in fact, ending very quickly. As I write, Kevin waves are transporting heat into the eastern Pacific and major seasonal models are signaling with unprecedented fixation that El Niño is just around the corner. What’s more, they point out that the next episode of ENSO is going to be between strong and very strong before we know it. First of all… what is El Niño in 127 words. What we know as El Niño-Southern Oscillation (or ENSO) is a cyclical (although somewhat irregular) climate phenomenon that has large effects on the global climate. During the warm phase (during El Niño itself), the lack of trade winds to cool the surface causes the temperature of the Pacific waters to skyrocket. And that, precisely that, disrupts all the Earth’s weather systems, causing the thermometers of the entire planet to skyrocket. As explained from AEMET“El Niño, through different atmospheric teleconnections, gives rise to drier than normal conditions in certain parts of the world; while in others it causes more precipitation. Some countries have to deal with significant droughts and others with torrential rains.” What happened now? Something quite curious, really. In just one week, we have gone from the most absolute tranquility (60-70% chance of neutral conditions) to 80% of a strong or very strong El Niño before summer ends. What has changed, as I said above, are the ocean signals: NOAA have found signs of significant subsurface warming, and that warming is the classic first sign that something is starting to change. Basically, since the beginning of the year there have been three episodes in which warm water from the western Pacific has been moving eastward. Changes in the wind pattern have also been detected. And why does it concern experts? Because these rapid changes are very similar to what happened in 1997. The super El Niño of 97-98 was one of the strongest ENSOs in recent years and caused numerous problems: the estimates say that he alone caused damage to global economic growth of around 5.7 trillion dollars. Obviously, many things They can go wrong between now and summerbut we would be wrong if we do not pay attention to the Pacific. We are at the doors of a global food crisisthe last thing we need is for El Niño to hit the Southern Hemisphere hard during the last months of the year. Image | NOAA In Xataka | Long periods of drought are going to become more and more normal. It’s time to get used to them