Topic
El Niño is a periodic warming of the tropical Pacific Ocean that shifts global weather, affecting fisheries, sea levels, rainfall and frost risk.
Indonesia's fires grew roughly fourfold after June as the strongest El Niño on record began forming, with emissions on track to match 2015. The event is still strengthening on 1.4C of warming, and the year's outlook leans on a short record of past El Niños.
Reality
UK climate minister Katie White says a record El Niño leaves the food system vulnerable to the warm, wet, stormy winter the Met Office forecasts. Muddy fields could stop winter wheat being sown, just after the UK's worst-ever harvest.
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Researchers warn an internal Kelvin wave from this year's super El Niño could lift California sea levels by up to 30 cm once it reaches the coast. The raised water would add to winter storm surges, though the oceanographer quoted expects it to distort tides for weeks.
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Chile's forestry body says parts of the Atacama took the heaviest seasonal rain in its records. The desert's dormant seed bank has responded with a bloom that is drawing tourists north of Santiago.
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Contiguous U.S. temperatures averaged 57.98 degrees F from January to August 2026, the hottest such stretch since records began in 1895, NOAA data show. Only a cooler-than-normal fall would keep 2026 from an annual record, Zeke Hausfather says.
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Jonathan Cedeno's Guayaquil survey found water off Ecuador up to 6°C warmer at 40 meters over ten weeks, as fishers along the Pacific coast land less. Surface water warmed 2.5 to 3°C, and so far the damage is recorded in skippers' own accounts from four countries, with El Niño's peak still ahead.
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Atlantic City's water in the late-September nor'easter hit its highest level since Superstorm Sandy in 2012, as peak surge met a full-moon high tide. A storm researcher calls the El Niño outlook unclear, but rising seas alone will make equally strong storms more damaging.
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Australian grain growers should treat frost as a growing El Nino risk, a phys.org analysis argues after frost killed highland crops in Papua New Guinea. The frost physics behind the warning holds up, but the claim that the risk is growing is harder to check.
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Woods Hole researchers are playing healthy-reef sounds to Caribbean coral larvae as hard coral cover for 2020-2024 sits 9.5% below its 1980-2009 level. Larvae they draw in will meet hotter water in 2027, and no settlement counts have been reported.
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NASA counts 20 named storms and nine hurricanes in the northeastern and central Pacific by Sept. 28, against 1991-2020 averages of 13.5 and 7.4. Colorado State data put storm energy at more than double the norm, so the season is running stronger as well as busier.
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Chile's President José Antonio Kast lost 14 approval points in March after refusing energy subsidies as the Hormuz closure raised prices. Voters across the region are punishing governments that fail on living costs, whatever their ideology, so policy is set to keep swinging.
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University of Maine data put the 2026 El Nino's daily anomaly at 3.11C, above a record that had stood since November 2015. The USGS says such events tilt winter odds toward a wet South and a dry Northwest and Ohio Valley, but do not guarantee any pattern.
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Nusantara Atlas satellite data put Indonesia's burned area at nearly 896,000 hectares by end-August, against an official 202,000 through July. The counts cover different months and methods, so the gap cannot yet be split between August burning and undercounting.
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El Niño's wind shear has helped hold the 2026 Atlantic to seven named storms and no hurricanes while the eastern Pacific logged eight hurricanes. Both oceans draw on tropical waves born over Africa, and this year those waves fared very differently on either side of Central America.
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A Category 1 peak, 30 to 35 inches of projected rain, and warnings across all eight major Hawaiian islands. The wind rating described almost none of the actual exposure.
Perspective Coverage
3 publishersReality
Copernicus logged 21.10 C on Aug. 22, one hundredth of a degree above March 2024. The timing, not the margin, is what should move planning assumptions.
Perspective Coverage
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The new altimeter has been sending low-latency measurements since July 15, but NOAA's operational ocean heat suite is only targeted to start using its ocean height data by the end of the year, so this El Nino is being forecast on the record that already existed.
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Hurricane Nolo has put Hawaii under a third hurricane watch this year, a first on record. Up to 35 inches of rain could still fall on parts of the Big Island, even though the storm is forecast to pass about 150 miles south.
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Freshwater storage has been declining for ten years. The WMO's new report locates the loss in the slow reserves, groundwater and glaciers, that used to absorb bad years.
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University of Chicago researchers project 451,000 extra heat deaths worldwide from El Niño by February 2027, with 31,400 of them in Nigeria. The estimate rests on a six-month forecast, so the Sahel has only this season to prepare.
Reality
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