Weather scientists watching the Pacific Ocean are witnessing something they’ve never seen — a “super El Niño” now forecast to blow past every record in the modern era, with one meteorologist claiming it could be the most extreme climate event in a thousand years.
The alarm intensified Wednesday when meteorologist Ben Noll flagged a new outlook from the European weather model, the ECMWF, projecting the event will peak near +4.0 degrees Celcius above average in the tropical Pacific this December. The number, he said, would obliterate the previous record. For context, the strongest El Niños ever instrumentally recorded, in 1997-98 and 2015-16, topped out around +2.6 degrees Celcius.
The forecasts have been climbing for months. NOAA declared an El Niño Advisory in June, and the World Meteorological Organization now puts the odds above 90%. Multiple models agree the event is barreling toward +3 degrees Celcius or higher, which several forecasters warned would make it the strongest on record.
Meteorologist Jeff Berardelli captured the disbelief among scientists. “If you had asked us if something like this was possible a year ago, it would have probably been a definitive no,” he wrote, noting the event is already running more than a degree — and three months — ahead of the monster 1997 El Niño. “We are headed into outer space.”
The most dramatic claim came from meteorologist Ryan Maue, who wrote that the “super El Niño” will “perhaps be the strongest in 500 to 1000 years” and “could legitimately be the most extreme global weather or climate event experienced by humanity since the invention of the printing press.”
The consequences, if the forecasts verify, would ripple worldwide.
Noll said the new outlook painted a “stormy winter picture” for the U.S. East and West coasts and Europe, driven by a turbocharged subtropical jet stream. Maue projected deluges from “atmospheric rivers” in California, a warm Canadian winter, and a wet, colder-than-normal, ice-storm-prone stretch from Texas across the Southeast and Florida. El Niño also tends to suppress Atlantic hurricanes while, as Berardelli noted, supercharging heat waves, wildfires and Pacific typhoons.
The World Meteorological Organization has already flagged heightened risks of drought, flooding and heat, and the World Economic Forum recently called the coming event “more than a climate event,” warning it could hit global food and energy systems at once. Past super El Niños have been linked to trillions of dollars in global economic losses.
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