By Tracy Cabrera
MANILA, Philippines — A potentially record-breaking El Niño is taking shape, with climate scientists warning that the powerful weather phenomenon could trigger extreme conditions worldwide and push 2027 to unprecedented levels of heat.
The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s (NOAA) Climate Prediction Center said in its latest forecast that the developing El Niño could become the strongest observed in its historical records.
Michelle L’Heureux, head of NOAA’s El Niño-Southern Oscillation (ENSO) team, said the phenomenon, coming on top of human-driven global warming, could provide a preview of the kind of temperatures the world may routinely experience in the coming decades.
ENSO develops when the normally strong east-to-west trade winds across the tropical Pacific weaken. This allows warm water that typically accumulates in the western Pacific to move eastward, where it reaches the surface and raises ocean temperatures over a broad area.
The resulting changes in ocean temperatures can disrupt weather patterns far beyond the Pacific. University of Miami climate scientist Emily Becker said a particularly strong El Niño could bring hotter and drier conditions to some regions while producing cooler and wetter weather elsewhere.
Becker noted that unusually warm ocean surfaces sustained for several months can fuel additional storms and cloud formation, setting off atmospheric changes that can influence weather patterns around the world.
Some of those effects are already becoming apparent, she said, pointing to Indonesia’s prolonged and intense dry season, which has contributed to wildfires affecting hundreds of thousands of hectares of forests and other land.
Data compiled by the Climate Brink dashboard, which uses NOAA satellite and buoy observations of sea-surface temperatures, showed that temperatures in the Niño 3.4 region of the Pacific were already around 2.6 degrees Celsius above the rolling 30-year average.
The Niño 3.4 region is a designated area of the central and eastern tropical Pacific widely used by scientists to monitor and measure the development of El Niño.
Forecasts compiled by the dashboard indicate that the temperature anomaly could reach about 3.9 degrees Celsius by November, potentially surpassing the roughly 3-degree anomaly recorded during the powerful 2015 El Niño event.
Climate scientists estimate that an exceptionally strong El Niño could temporarily add around 0.3 degree Celsius to the planet’s average temperature on top of the underlying warming trend caused by greenhouse gas emissions.
If those projections materialize, global temperatures in 2027 could reach approximately 1.76 degrees Celsius above preindustrial levels, effectively bringing into a single year an amount of warming that might otherwise have occurred over a much longer period.
NOAA’s Pacific Marine Environmental Laboratory has also acknowledged the possibility of an extraordinary temperature spike, saying it is not impossible for 2027 to reach about 1.7 degrees Celsius above preindustrial levels if current model projections prove accurate.
NOAA has meanwhile introduced a revised way of measuring El Niño. In February, the agency adopted the Relative Oceanic Niño Index, which compares warming in the Niño 3.4 region with temperature increases across the broader tropical belt in an effort to more accurately capture the ocean-atmosphere processes behind ENSO.
Although the measurements are lower under the revised index, the projected strength of the phenomenon remains striking.
NOAA currently estimates a 69 percent probability that the developing El Niño will become the strongest in its dataset dating back to 1950, underscoring the potential for major climate and weather disruptions in the months ahead.
ia/xf
