A super El Niño is on course to beat 2015 and hold into 2027

The 2026-27 El Niño is already being treated as a record candidate. The US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration declared the event on 11 June. By late August, model ensembles used by Carbon Brief put a 96 percent chance that the peak sea-surface anomaly in the Niño 3.4 region will exceed the 2.75 C mark set in 2015-16.

Jeff Berardelli, a Tampa meteorologist who spoke to PBS NewsHour on 1 September, said the eastern Pacific anomaly could max out near 4 C. Washington Post forecast maps published in July had the December peak around 3.9 C, about a degree above the 2015 event. A super El Niño is an informal label for a jump of at least 2 C. This one is expected to clear that bar by a wide margin.

Heat already in the water

About 90 percent of the extra heat trapped by greenhouse gases sits in the ocean. El Niño is the mechanism that dumps a slice of that stored heat back into the air. Copernicus recorded a daily global average sea-surface temperature of 21.1 C in late August, above the previous record from March 2024.

The New York Times, using the same observational series, wrote on 25 August that this episode is on track to be the strongest in at least 80 years of precise records, and possibly the strongest in centuries. Those are large claims. The hard number underneath them is the Niño 3.4 anomaly, not a press adjective.

Who is already paying

Panama has had both floods on the Caribbean side and a rainfall shortage in the central watersheds that feed the canal. The Panama Canal Authority will cut daily transits from 36 to 34 on 3 September and to 32 on 15 September. Slot fees have already hit records. That is a freight cost that will show up in Asian-US schedules this autumn.

Guatemala’s July rainfall ran about 85 percent below average in some growing areas. France’s 2026 wildfire season has been classed as the worst since 1949, with heatwaves tied in part to the developing Pacific pattern. Israel’s meteorological service warned in July of extreme short-burst rain and then forecast 20 to 30 mm in one to three hours in late August.

The World Food Programme has projected that the event could drive an additional 49 million people into hunger. That figure is a projection, not a count. It sits beside a separate WFP cut this week in the West Bank, which the agency blamed on donor budgets rather than the Pacific.

What the next 16 months look like

El Niño events typically peak in December. This one is expected to last into 2027. Forecast shops now give more than an 80 percent chance that 2027 will be the warmest year on record, because the Pacific heat release lands on top of the long-term warming trend.

Through September, Washington Post analysis of three-month outlooks put about 2.8 billion people in zones with at least a 10 percent chance of temperatures in the top 5 percent of the historical range for the season. About 1.4 billion live in zones with a raised chance of much less rain than normal. About 757 million live in zones with a raised chance of too much.

India’s own Q1 farm print already slowed to 3.6 percent after a delayed monsoon onset. The next two agricultural quarters will show whether the Pacific pattern and the Bay of Bengal line up or fight each other. That is the domestic reading of a global ocean event.

The scientific caution is simple. “Super El Niño” is a media phrase, not a formal class in the NOAA handbook. The formal test is the size and persistence of the Niño 3.4 anomaly. On present model runs, that test is likely to be met by winter.