The El Niño weather system now taking shape in the tropical Pacific may rank among the most powerful recorded in seven decades, and scientists warn it will hit harder still because climate change is already amplifying every degree of warming it generates.
Australia’s Bureau of Meteorology confirmed Tuesday that sea surface temperatures in the central tropical Pacific have crossed El Niño thresholds, with atmospheric indicators showing the weather pattern has fully established itself. Forecasts point toward what the bureau described as a strong to very strong event — with roughly half of the predictive models it assessed suggesting the system could peak at intensities not observed since systematic tracking began in 1950, more than 70 years ago.
That means the worst may still be ahead.
The United Nations’ World Meteorological Organization placed the probability of El Niño persisting through June to August 2026 at 80 percent, with odds rising to 90 percent or better that the pattern will continue through at least November.
For a phenomenon that historically lasts nine to 12 months, the trajectory the models are tracing is a prolonged and severe one — and the WMO warned the pattern would distort global temperature and rainfall distributions, raising the risk of extreme weather across multiple continents simultaneously.
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Australia has particular reason to watch the buildup with alarm. The country ranks among the world’s leading exporters of wheat, sugar, and beef, and El Niño functions as a direct suppressor of rainfall across Australia’s eastern agricultural belt during winter and spring — the months when those crops most need moisture. Daytime temperatures across the south are expected to rise above seasonal norms. The 2023–2024 El Niño, the most recent cycle, delivered the driest three consecutive months on record. Before that, the 2015–2016 event, itself among the most powerful in modern history, triggered widespread drought and produced sharp falls in oilseed and grain output across the continent. Two major events within a decade; now potentially a third, tracking stronger than either.
What makes this cycle distinct is not only its projected scale. Climate scientists studying the interaction between El Niño and long-term atmospheric warming have concluded that rising global temperatures will supercharge the system, deepening droughts at one extreme and intensifying rainfall events at the other. The natural variability of the Pacific now operates inside a climate baseline that has been permanently shifted upward.
The effects will not be contained to the Southern Hemisphere. Forecasters expect El Niño to drive excessive rainfall across the Americas while pushing hot and dry conditions through much of Asia — a region already managing crop-planting disruptions and early strain on food supplies.
For nations that depend on agricultural exports from Australia and other major producers, another El Niño-driven contraction means higher commodity prices and shrinking supply buffers with little room for error.
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The historical record on what these cycles can cost is not a distant abstraction. Historians studying major El Niño events have documented famines that killed millions of people, with the episodes of 1877 and 1878 among the most catastrophic on record. The world now has weather monitoring systems and international alert mechanisms that did not exist then. What remains unresolved is whether the response infrastructure — the food reserves, the agricultural adaptation programs, the financial safety nets for import-dependent nations — is adequate for an event at the scale currently being projected.
United Nations Secretary-General António Guterres answered that uncertainty with a demand. In a video statement following the WMO’s June 2 assessment, he called on governments to treat the emerging El Niño as “the urgent climate warning it is,” and pressed for a response proportionate to the threat: ending fossil fuel dependence, accelerating the deployment of renewable energy, protecting the most vulnerable populations, and delivering functional early warning systems to communities that currently have none.
The WMO defines El Niño as a warming of ocean surface temperatures in the central and eastern equatorial Pacific that recurs roughly every two to seven years. The current event follows the 2023–2024 cycle after a notably compressed interval, and is already tracking at greater intensity at a comparable point in its development.
When the peak arrives — likely in the second half of 2026 — Australian farmlands will be in the middle of the seasons that determine the harvest. The ocean temperatures confirm the event is coming. What is still being calculated is how hard.