El Niño Coming This Summer, Says NOAA In Update; What Does That Mean For Summer Temperatures And Hurricane Season?

What Super El Niño Could Mean For US

El Niño is expected to develop this summer, and it could grow into a super El Niño by the end of the year.

La Niña is expected to fade over the next month as waters continue to warm in the equatorial Pacific. The chance of El Niño developing has risen to 62% during June, July and August, NOAA said in a Thursday morning update.

While forecasts are more uncertain in the spring and the strength of the upcoming warming phase remains very uncertain, NOAA is forecasting a 1-in-3 chance of a super El Niño by October, November and December. A super El Niño is defined as water temperatures being at least 1.5°C above average over several months.

This is expected to be the strongest El Niño since 2023-2024, which was one of the top five strongest warming episodes on record. More on that episode below.

Here’s what this forecast means for the next few months:

What Is El Niño?

El Niño occurs when the winds blowing east to west in the Pacific Ocean along the equator weaken, allowing warmer waters to collect across the eastern Pacific’s equatorial region.

This has global impacts, and when this happens it can have vast impacts for the U.S. weather.

(MORE: Everything You Need To Know About El Niño)

El Niño’s Impacts

But what El Niño occurring in the summer does impact is hurricanes. The stronger the El Niño, the more shear that occurs in the Atlantic Ocean. Hurricanes hate shear in the atmosphere, so El Niño occurring during the summer and lasting into the fall can lead to weaker and a lower frequency of hurricanes in the Atlantic Basin.

El Nino Into The Winter?

Should the El Niño hold into the winter, the jet streams typically get shunted northward. As a result, wetter and cooler winters are expected for the South, while the North stays relatively dry and warm on average.

This is contrasted to if there is a La Niña during the winter, where essentially the opposite is true: We get drier winters for the South and wetter and cooler winters for the North.

When Was The Last El Niño?

Believe it or not, we have generally been in a La Niña or neutral phase of the El Niño Southern Oscillation Index (ENSO) for most of the last 10 years.

Since 2017, there was an El Niño during the winter of 2018 before switching to a neutral phase until the spring of 2020, when we returned to a La Niña phase.

After this, we actually stayed in a La Niña all the way to the winter of 2023 before returning to a neutral phase. El Niño again began to occur in the summer of 2023, lasting through to the late winter of 2024. That event led to much above average temperatures across the Midwest and wetter than average conditions in the Plains.

We then largely returned to a La Niña ever since.

Models are all but confirming that El Niño is coming, but the severity and longevity are still being locked down.