WMO says the 2026 El Niño may run off the charts into early 2027

The World Meteorological Organization said on 3 September that the present El Niño is set to become very strong, is near certain to last through February 2027, and may outrun every event in the agency's comparable record. Secretary-General Celeste Saulo told a Geneva briefing that if the present path holds, the episode could be "stronger than anything since our monitoring began." The WMO called this the first time an El Niño/La Niña update had been written with that degree of certainty.

Wilfran Moufouma-Okia, who leads the WMO climate prediction section, said a "very strong" label starts at a sea-surface temperature anomaly of more than 2C in the central and eastern equatorial Pacific. The average of the current forecast suite points to a peak near plus 3.6C, above the peaks of 1997-98 and 2015-16. Some model runs cited in later science coverage go higher still. The Niño 3.4 box, the usual yardstick, was already around 2.6C above average when those briefings were prepared.

NOAA, in a separate US assessment quoted alongside the UN figures, put at 69 percent the chance that this event becomes the strongest on the instrumental record. The WMO's own language is the near-100 percent probability that the pattern persists through February 2027. Impacts, the agency said, will not stop when the ocean index turns down. Heat stored in the Pacific takes months to work through the wider climate system, which is why 2027 is expected to feel the event after the peak.

El Niño is a periodic warming of the eastern tropical Pacific that follows a slackening of the trade winds. It rearranges rainfall. Parts of the Horn of Africa, the southern United States and western South America often get more rain. Parts of Australia, Indonesia, southern Africa and northern South America often get less. The WMO's September-November outlook already points to above-normal temperatures across almost all land areas. UN Secretary-General António Guterres, speaking as the update landed, said the world was in "the danger zone of extreme weather."

The International Organization for Migration asked on the same day for US$110 million to protect 4.9 million people from the knock-on effects. That appeal is a planning number, not a damage bill. The damage bill will be written in flood crests, failed rains and heat records as the boreal winter arrives.

Only four El Niño events since 1950 have been classed as very strong. This is on course to be the fifth, and the WMO is no longer treating that class as a ceiling. Moufouma-Okia said the category "is open: we know where it starts; we don't know where it ends." That sentence is the useful part of the briefing. The agency is not claiming a single peak number with three decimal places. It is saying the models agree on direction and that the upper bound is not in sight.

For India the usual El Niño worry is a weaker monsoon. The 2026 southwest monsoon is already late in its season. The WMO text does not assign a rainfall total to any one country. It does say the extra ocean heat sits on top of the warming already produced by greenhouse gases, so the same El Niño index now produces a hotter world than the same index did in 1997.

The next official updates will show whether Niño 3.4 crosses 3C in September, as some US model maps suggest, or peaks later in the year. Either way the WMO has told governments to plan through the first months of 2027, not through Christmas.