El Niño Watch: NOAA Sees Rising Odds of a Powerful Climate Shift

A new update about the chances of El Niño has been released by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA). The verdict? The data suggest that El Niño is lurking and could be stronger than ever. Here is a look at the latest information and what this means for the weather around the world.

NOAA Models Increasingly Favor El Niño Development

NOAA released a new update last week detailing the chances that El Niño will become the dominant climate phase. The question now is not if El Niño will emerge, but how strong it will be.

In its monthly outlook released on May 14, the Climate Prediction Center (CPC) out of NOAA noted that models are signaling that El Niño could come to life as early as June. The forecast model runs over the last month from the CPC continues to show that El Niño is trending stronger with each month. Going back to the March and April model runs, forecasters are growing more bullish that El Niño will exert a powerful influence on the weather patterns in the U.S. and around the world.

In addition to the NOAA model, the forecasting from the European Centre for Medium Range Weather Forecasting is also trending in a direction that indicates that El Niño will be stronger than originally anticipated. With all of the various modeling runs becoming more aligned, it gives meteorologists more confidence that El Niño will be a force to reckon with in the months ahead.

This periodic warming of the ocean water in the central and eastern equatorial Pacific impacts how the weather unfolds across the planet for several months. El Niños tend to happen every three to four years. The last El Niño formed in the summer of 2023 and persisted into the early spring of 2024. Going back to 1950, there have been 27 documented El Niños.