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 ...
Good fishing! I’ll bet they put up a fight, too!
I lived in Imperial Beach, south of San Diego, CA 1980-82 - next town - Tijuana, Mexico.
It wasn’t El Nino. Some bums started our gorgeous pier on fire smokin’ crack or something. I watched it burn from my front window. :(
What a shame and what a waste. It was one of my favorite places to be, year-round, just watching the weather, fishing, watching the ocean, looking for dolphins and whales. It was magical for a land-locked Midwesterner.
Yep - extra heat in the Pacific means slightly cooler waters in the Atlantic...one of these days, they’ll figure out it’s cyclic.
Indeed it was!
Yesterday was hot and its an oven already today. But back to 80 degrees on Monday.
👍
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