An El Niño climate pattern that is likely to develop this summer may be severe, federal scientists warned Thursday in a forecast that raised threats of record heat, floods and other weather extremes around the planet this year and next.
The Climate Prediction Center, part of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, issued an El Niño watch estimating a chance of about 80 percent that the phenomenon known for boosting global warmth would arrive by August — a significant change from a February prediction that suggested 60 percent odds that the pattern would develop in the fall. During an El Niño, warmer-than-normal waters in the central and eastern Pacific Ocean cause weather patterns to shift in ways that drive heat waves, drought and floods globally, but can also stunt the Atlantic hurricane season.
The researchers said there is about a one in three chance the next El Niño will be at least as strong as the last one, which pushed global temperatures in 2023 and 2024 above a long-feared warming threshold — 1.5 degrees Celsius (2.7 degrees Fahrenheit) above preindustrial norms — for the first time.
The forecast also raises questions about whether the United States is prepared for the disasters an El Niño can trigger or intensify.
The Trump administration has let go thousands of Federal Emergency Management Agency workers since early last year. A plan to overhaul the disaster agency was in limbo even before President Trump fired Kristi Noem, the Homeland Security Department secretary overseeing that work, last week. Mr. Trump also oversaw the dismantling of the U.S. Agency for International Development, which sent humanitarian aid to disaster-struck countries.
“It’s like having a ship stall out in front of a tidal wave,” said Jesse Anttila-Hughes, an associate professor of economics at the University of San Francisco.
FEMA officials could not be reached for comment.
The administration’s approach to disaster management has been largely untested so far.
Reviews that Ms. Noem imposed were found to have delayed deployment of search and rescue teams and prevented victims from reaching a FEMA call center during what was perhaps the most prominent disaster of 2025, Texas floods in July that killed more than 130 people. FEMA has also slowed or blocked state and local governments’ access to grants and other disaster aid that they use to prepare for emergencies.
But no hurricanes made landfall on U.S. shores last year, and Western wildfires burned across a smaller-than-average footprint.
That relative quiet spell — amid an era of increasingly frequent and costly disasters — could end with a strong El Niño.
El Niño, a natural fluctuation involving shifts in Pacific tradewinds, last developed in May 2023 and persisted for a year, as it typically does. Scientists linked it to drought in Southern Africa and flooding in the Horn of Africa; drought and wildfires in the Amazon; extreme heat stress on coral reefs; intense rainfall in Southern California; and record-low winter ice cover across the Great Lakes.
The El Niño pattern, marked by warmer-than-average Pacific waters along the Equator, is known in the United States for discouraging Atlantic hurricanes, potentially easing some pressure on disaster response. But the 2023 Atlantic hurricane season was the fourth most active on record despite El Niño.
The pattern also usually increases overall precipitation from Southern California to the Gulf Coast and Florida. Its name refers to “the Christ child” in Spanish and was bestowed by South American fishermen who noticed instances of warm waters in the eastern Pacific around Christmas as early as the 1600s.
A waning La Niña pattern — the opposite of El Niño, bringing cooler-than-normal waters to the eastern Pacific — has persisted since September and is expected to end by May, NOAA said.
Other forecasts have already warned about El Niño. A European climate forecasting model this month showed a much higher likelihood than the NOAA forecast that El Niño could become at least as intense as the 2023-24 event. And it also suggested a “super” El Niño was as much as twice as likely as NOAA’s Thursday forecast indicated. The U.S. agency is predicting just a 10 to 15 percent chance of an “extreme” El Niño.
The World Meteorological Organization “will be carefully monitoring conditions in the coming months to inform decision-making,” its secretary general, Celeste Saulo, said this month.
The European model’s forecasts “caught our attention,” said Nathaniel Johnson, a meteorologist at NOAA’s Geophysical Fluid Dynamics Laboratory who was involved in the U.S. agency’s forecast. But he said the predictions issued Thursday reflect a broader range of climate model analyses.
“There’s still considerable uncertainty about the strength of the event,” Mr. Johnson said.
It was nonetheless remarkable, he added, that climate models were showing such strong odds that El Niño would form in the next five to six months. Predictions made at this time of year, when the systems driving El Niño are often in flux, are notoriously difficult to trust.
There is “unusually high confidence” that El Niño is coming, Mr. Johnson said.
Scott Dance is a Times reporter who covers how climate change and extreme weather are transforming society.
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