El Niño has intensified and is off the scale, experts said. Conventional measures of the phenomenon have surpassed previous record levels in the period with reliable data, although peak effects are still several months away.
There are different ways to measure El Niño events, which occur when warm surface waters extend eastward along the equator across the surface of the tropical Pacific Ocean. Scientists consider the best measure to be how much warmer than usual the upper 300 metres of the eastern tropical Pacific becomes. The preferred heat anomaly metric for the first 300 metres of the equatorial Pacific Ocean already exceeds the 1997-98 super El Niño, according to one researcher.
The Niño3.4 index, a more common measure based on how much warmer than usual the sea surface temperature is in the equatorial Pacific, would also far exceed previous values, he said. However, an expert from the UK Met Office said the Niño3.4 index has not yet surpassed previous super El Niños, noting that the anomaly is currently around 2 degrees above normal, very high for this time of year but not as high as the peak of the 1997-1998 El Niño, which was around 2.5 degrees.
What is clear is that this developing super El Niño will soon exceed previous events in all measures. One researcher said he has never seen such an intense El Niño signal in forecasts, and stated that if the forecast is accurate, then 2026 will far exceed the recent experience of El Niño and its global climate influences.
A researcher from Newcastle University in the UK suggested that the evolving super El Niño in the Pacific will likely be the largest ever recorded, reaching or exceeding the levels of the 1877-1878 El Niño, which caused widespread impacts including famines and approximately 50 million deaths, mainly in Asia and South America.
