NASA’s Images Reveal Why This Super El Niño Could Be Unlike Anything Before

Something has been building in the Pacific Ocean for months, and satellites are watching it happen in near real time. The images look almost abstract at first: swirling patches of elevated ocean surface, color-mapped into deep reds and whites, tracking eastward across the world’s largest body of water like slow-moving heat. But what those colors represent is anything but abstract. They are warm Kelvin waves (large pulses of heated ocean water) on the move, and what follows in their wake could affect weather across every continent on Earth. Scientists have a name for the phenomenon they may precede: a super El Niño. And right now, forecasters are watching 2026 with real unease.

The timing is not coincidental. We are already living through the hottest period in recorded human history, and the planetary baseline is hotter than it has ever been when a strong El Niño has arrived. That combination has some of the world’s leading climate scientists choosing their words carefully, and some of them not being careful at all.

Understanding what may be coming requires going back to the basics of a climate cycle that has been shaping human civilization, quietly and catastrophically, for centuries.

What El Niño Actually Does – and Why “Super” Matters

El Niño represents the warm stage of a natural climate cycle in the tropical Pacific called the El Niño-Southern Oscillation, or ENSO. Under normal conditions in the Pacific, trade winds blow westward along the equator, moving warm water from South America toward Asia, while cold water rises from the ocean depths to replace it. During an El Niño, winds over the far western Pacific shift from their normal easterly direction to westerlies. That shift, combined with a general weakening of easterly winds along the equator, causes water in the western Pacific tropics to get warmer and sea levels to rise. The resulting wave then travels east over several weeks, eventually reaching South America and causing water off the coast to heat up and rise.

El Niños can cause heavy precipitation in some regions and deficits in others, influencing daily life and commerce around the world. In more modest events, impacts such as drought and flooding were mostly felt in and around the tropical Pacific. Large El Niños reach much farther, causing drought in Africa and flooding in California. A so-called “super” El Niño pushes that intensity well beyond the already-dramatic baseline. A super El Niño is defined by sea surface temperatures in a key stretch of the central Pacific rising more than 2°C (3.6°F) above normal. Only three have occurred in recorded history: in 1982/83, 1997/98, and 2015/16.

The 1997-98 event remains the benchmark for what “very bad” looks like. That El Niño caused sea levels to rise in large parts of the world and produced floods, cyclones, droughts, and wildfires. A 2000 UN Environment Programme report estimated that El Niño-related damage from that event ranged from $32 to $96 billion, with approximately 23,000 deaths attributed to it globally.

NASA’s Satellite Is Tracking the Warning Signs Right Now

The international Sentinel-6 Michael Freilich sea level satellite has observed a swell of warm water, called a Kelvin wave, moving eastward in the equatorial Pacific Ocean, arriving off the South American coast in May. Warm Kelvin waves often precede El Niño events. Launched in 2020 by NASA and led by ESA (European Space Agency) for the EU Copernicus Programme, the Sentinel-6 Michael Freilich satellite measures and maps water height for the entire ocean every 10 days, down to fractions of an inch. Because water expands as it warms, a rise in the elevation of an area of the ocean directly indicates increasing ocean temperatures.

Measurements from the satellite show a small Kelvin wave forming around Micronesia in late January 2026, dissipating by mid-February. A new wave emerged in early March, then moved east over time. By mid-May, the seas around Peru were more than 5.9 inches higher than long-term averages. That is not a subtle signal. It is a measurable, trackable sign that the ocean is accumulating heat in exactly the pattern that precedes an El Niño event.

Josh Willis, a sea level researcher at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory and project scientist for Sentinel-6 Michael Freilich, said: “While this year’s event started a bit later than the big El Niños of 2015 and 1997, it’s beginning to catch up.” He added, pointedly: “We’ll see how big it gets.”

Severine Fournier, deputy project scientist for Sentinel-6 Michael Freilich at JPL, noted that “every El Niño is different,” but added: “They almost always make for a hot year and big changes in rainfall in parts of the globe.”

Could This One Be the Strongest on Record?

That is the question keeping forecasters up at night. NOAA’s Climate Prediction Center has placed the ENSO alert system on El Niño Watch, with an 82% chance of El Niño emerging between May and July 2026, climbing to a 96% chance for the December 2026 to February 2027 peak window.

Odds of a super El Niño between November and January have increased from a 1-in-4 chance to about a 1-in-3 chance, according to the latest strength probabilities from NOAA’s Climate Prediction Center. Some typically reliable computer models show this year’s potential super El Niño could be the strongest on record – including ensemble runs from ECMWF, NOAA, and Australia’s Bureau of Meteorology, several of which suggest this event could surpass the record-breaking El Niño of 1877-1878. It would be the first super El Niño since 2015-2016, which was the strongest in NOAA records dating to 1950.

The modeling picture is alarming even in its more conservative scenarios. The latest projections from NOAA all show sea surface temperatures rising at least 4.5°F (2.5°C) above average by November. Some shoot over the top of the chart, predicting temperature increases of more than 7.2°F (4°C) by that month.

Climate scientist Daniel Swain of the University of California Agriculture and Natural Resources said: “In modern human history, we’ve never experienced a strong or very strong El Niño event amid pre-existing conditions that were this warm globally.” He added: “Therefore, it would not be surprising to see some unprecedented global impacts by later in 2026 into 2027 in terms of flood, drought, and wildfire-related extremes.”

That global warming baseline is the critical context. NASA confirms global temperatures in 2024 were 2.30°F above the agency’s 20th-century baseline, and 2024 was the hottest year on record, a result of the combination of the powerful 2023-2024 El Niño and human-induced climate change. Now a new, potentially stronger cycle is building on top of that already-elevated baseline.

A Warming Planet Makes Every Super El Niño Hit Harder

El Niño is not a consequence of human-caused climate change – it is a natural climate phenomenon that has been documented for centuries. However, global warming can intensify the effects of El Niño, making periods of drought and dryness, as well as heatwaves, even more extreme.

El Niño is a natural climate cycle that happens when the tropical Pacific Ocean warms enough to trigger shifts in wind patterns throughout the atmosphere, which has a ripple effect on weather conditions worldwide. Droughts and heat waves can flourish in some regions, fueling wildfire danger and water supply concerns, while others are swamped by flooding rainfall.

Theodore Keeping, an extreme weather and climate researcher at Imperial College London, warned: “This rapid start, in combination with the forecast El Niño, means that we’re looking at a particularly severe year.” Wildfires don’t just kill people in the moment – they impact air quality for hundreds of kilometers around, leading to many different health problems.

A December 2025 study published in Nature Communications found that super El Niño events significantly increase the likelihood of abrupt, persistent transitions in temperature, sea surface conditions, and soil moisture that can endure for years or even decades after the El Niño has faded. Under global warming scenarios, this effect would be “greatly amplified,” with the central North Pacific, the Gulf of Mexico, East Africa, the Amazon, central Australia, and the Maritime Continent around Indonesia likely to be worst affected. The implication is that the effects of a 2026 super El Niño may not simply reverse when Pacific temperatures cool again.

What This Means for Food Prices, Storms, and Your Life

The effects of a super El Niño are not abstract statistics. They arrive in grocery stores, on coastlines, and inside insurance premiums. Researchers estimate the last super El Niño, from 2015 to 2016, ultimately cost the global economy $3.9 trillion.

According to the United Nations Office for Disaster Risk Reduction, the projected El Niño will likely lead to drought conditions reducing corn, rice, and wheat production across Asia and Australia, while enhanced precipitation boosts soybean production in the Americas. That asymmetry means global food prices will not move uniformly, but they will move. A 2025 study found that extreme weather caused by climate change has been driving up the prices of basic food products worldwide, with the cost of a wide range of goods – from vegetables in California to coffee in Brazil – seeing dramatic spikes due to weather conditions that exceeded all historical precedent prior to 2020.

For the UK specifically, the direct weather effects will be milder than those felt closer to the tropics, but not irrelevant. Professor Emily Black, a meteorology professor at the University of Reading, explained that “direct El Niño effects on the UK weather are weak compared to lower latitudes,” but noted that during El Niño summers, the UK tends to see somewhat warmer temperatures, while winters tend to start slightly wetter before cold spells develop. “Even though the direct impacts on the UK are comparatively weak, we should be concerned about impacts on food prices and the global food supply chains,” she added.

In the United States, NOAA’s official 2026 Atlantic hurricane season forecast predicts a below-average season, with a 55% chance of below-normal activity, 8 to 14 named storms, and 3 to 6 hurricanes. El Niño is associated with fewer tropical storms and hurricanes in the Atlantic but increased activity in the Pacific. That said, fewer Atlantic hurricanes offers little comfort if the drought and wildfire impacts across the American West unfold as forecast.

What the Temperature Records Are Telling Us

On a larger scale, El Niño causes already rising global temperatures from human-caused climate change to spike even higher. The trend line is not encouraging. The World Meteorological Organization confirmed that last year was among the three warmest on record, and the last 11 years rank as the warmest ever recorded.

The WMO and UK Met Office joint analysis finds an 86% chance that one year between 2026 and 2030 will surpass 2024 as the warmest year on record. A more likely impact is global heat: El Niño is loading the dice toward 2026 or 2027, becoming Earth’s warmest on record.

Climate scientist Friederike Otto, professor in climate science at Imperial College London and co-founder of World Weather Attribution, said El Niño itself is “not the reason to freak out” – but rather the fact that it is now happening on an increasingly warmer baseline. She noted that human-driven warming alone would likely be enough to fuel weather records this year, but El Niño raises a “serious risk” of unprecedented extremes.

The WMO report says this El Niño event could stretch all the way to 2028. If that proves accurate, the world would spend the better part of three years inside a single weather distortion – not just adapting to a new season, but to a new climate reality layered on top of an already-changed one.

What to Do Now

The honest answer is that no individual preparation fully offsets a planetary-scale climate event. But knowledge is not nothing. Understanding what is coming, and when, is the first practical tool.

Domestically, the immediate priorities are straightforward. If you live in an area prone to drought, wildfires, or flooding, now is the time to review your insurance coverage, check your local emergency plans, and build even a modest household resilience buffer – stored water, non-perishable food, and a clear plan for extreme heat. El Niños typically peak between November and January, so there are still several months before the largest impacts become clear. That window matters.

On food, the signal is worth tracking. The looming El Niño threatens to further destabilize global supply chains, particularly as it coincides with conflict-induced trade restrictions that have already pushed transpacific container rates sharply higher and restricted fertilizer exports. Anyone managing a household budget should expect that pressure to arrive at the checkout.

Professor Adam Scaife, head of long-range prediction at the UK Met Office, said: “We know that under climate change, the impacts of El Niño events are going to get stronger, and you have to add that to the effects of climate change itself, which is growing all the time.” What is tracking eastward across the Pacific right now is not a new phenomenon. It is a very old one, arriving in a world that has made it considerably harder to absorb.

The Bottom Line

Whatever the final strength of the 2026 event turns out to be, the science is pointing in one direction. Even a moderate El Niño, sitting on top of the hottest global baseline ever recorded, is expected to produce weather extremes that would have seemed exceptional a generation ago. A strong or super event could push conditions well beyond anything in the modern record.

For most people, the most useful thing to do right now is treat this as an early warning, not background noise. Check whether your home or region is flagged in your local emergency management system for drought, flood, or extreme heat risk. If you grow food, plan for supply disruptions. If you rely on a fixed income, prepare for food prices to move. And regardless of where you live, pay attention to air quality warnings this summer – wildfire smoke travels farther than most people expect, and global data already shows that more than 163 million hectares burned between January and early May 2026, the highest level for this period since satellite tracking began in 2012. The fire season has not yet peaked. The El Niño has not yet formed. What comes next is worth watching closely.

AI Disclaimer: This article was created with the assistance of AI tools and reviewed by a human editor.

Read More: Scientists Warn 2026 El Niño Could Be the Strongest in 155 Years