Posted on 06/11/2026 6:12:06 PM PDT by Diana in Wisconsin
El Niño has officially begun, and it is forecast to intensify into a very strong or “Super” El Niño with major shifts in global weather patterns and an even hotter climate, according to a new report released Thursday morning from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.
El Niño is a periodic weather pattern in the tropical Pacific Ocean that alters winds and features unusually hot waters in the central and eastern Pacific. These changes in winds and ocean temperatures have knock-on effects on weather patterns worldwide.
NOAA’s Climate Prediction Center is giving this El Niño a 63% chance of becoming a “very strong” event (colloquially known as a Super El Niño) and one of the “largest El Niño events in the historical record going back to 1950.” In a sign of the center’s certainty in the forecast, it’s giving 100% odds of El Niño continuing through the fall and extremely high odds continuing into the winter.
For it to be considered a Super El Niño, tropical Pacific water temperatures must be more than 2 degrees above average. Some reliable computer models suggest that bar will be greatly exceeded.
For the past few months, large volumes of unusually hot water have been sloshing from the western Pacific to the eastern tropical Pacific, forced by shifting winds. This unusually hot water has traveled about 600 to 1,000 feet beneath the ocean surface and is beginning to rise to the sea surface thousands of miles to the east, closer to South America. Similar dynamics have played out during past intense El Niños.
Super El Niño events are relatively rare, with the most recent ones occurring in 2015-16, 1997-98 and 1982-83.
(Excerpt) Read more at cnn.com ...
I lost count of the number of doomsday scenarios I have survived in my 70+ years of being here.
It’s going to be summer here in the SW United States in a few days. It’s happened every year since I was born. Plan appropriately like just people have done here for centuries.
“Super El Niño events are relatively rare, with the most recent ones occurring in 2015-16, 1997-98 and 1982-83”
Do these people even read the crap they write?
Global cooling.
Global warming.
Climate change.
AIDS.
Y2K.
Ebola.
Aids. again.
Covid.
Monkey pox. Aids again.
What’s next?
El Niño refers to the Christ child because it arrives around Christmas. That’s why “La Nina” is such a stupid name.
Phoenix summer aint for sissies.
I believe that you captured most of them but I’m not really sure…
Heavy on BS with some science thrown in.
And “niño” means CHILD.
Looks like one of the dung heaps from Jurassic Park or an African anthill if you want to be more subtle.
Sounds lovely. Is it near Pleasantville?
I was living near Seal Beach in 1982-83 when El Niño came by and destroyed the Seal Beach pier. That was the most devastating one I’ve experienced. We moved to AZ in 1996 so none of the others were particularly memorable for me.
I gotta tell ya, when I lived in San Diego in the late 90s, all my people were fishing bros. And we welcomed The Child. Hot water meant hot fishing for pelagic species. Some of the ocean kayak guys were catching yellowtail and albacore near the kelp just outside of Point Loma. Any time you could still see land and catch a tuna, that’s close. I just know some of my old buddies are looking at plenty of blood on the decks of their vessels this summer.
Yeah, everything is rare in some respect.
Time will tell what we get.
We’ll know when it gets here.
There’s nothing like the Great Lakes to either exacerbate or lessen the effects of El Niño.
82-83 was really bad, especially in the Santa Cruz mountains where property damage was extensive and 10 people died in a mudslide at Love Creek. 25 inches of rain in 36 hours!
I was living in Santa Barbara at that time and after “the big one” my friends and I were able to walk from the beach to the harbor breakwater - it took them months to dredge out the channel. In 97 I lived in the Santa Cruz mountains and had to evacuate as my riverside neighborhood flooded and several homes were lost. In 16-17 I got to work from home a lot because every route through the Santa Cruz mountains was closed from San Francisco to Salinas.
Given that I’ve experienced three Grande El Niños in my 53 years in CA I hardly see them as “relatively rare”. Just another scare tactic to make readers think the climate sky is falling...again.
Last winter was miserable. It was La Niña. I welcome El Niño.
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