El Niño Returns: What This Summer’s Powerful Weather Pattern Means for Droughts, Floods, and Global Climate

The notorious El Niño weather pattern is making a comeback this summer, threatening regions worldwide with intense rainfall, severe storms, and prolonged droughts. Scientists are closely watching, though the exact strength of this upcoming event remains uncertain. At its core, El Niño is a huge wave of warm water surging across the central and eastern Pacific Ocean, right along the Equator. This happens when the usual trade winds, which typically keep warm ocean water concentrated in the western Pacific, weaken or even reverse. When they do, this vast pool of warm water ‘sloshes’ eastward, heading straight for the coast of South America. This natural climate cycle typically emerges every three to seven years and usually sticks around for about nine to twelve months. The last El Niño event, active through 2022 and 2023, played a significant role in pushing global temperatures to record highs as the atmosphere absorbed an immense amount of heat from the warming oceans. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s (NOAA) Climate Prediction Center announced recently that there’s a 50 to 60 percent chance of El Niño developing by late summer. They cautioned, however, that forecasts made at this time of year often have a wider margin of error, and model predictions still show considerable uncertainty regarding its intensity. During the cooler months, El Niño has the power to shift the jet stream over the North Pacific and North America southwards, closer to the Equator. This often brings a wetter winter to the Southern U.S. and a drier one to the Northern states, explained Michelle L’Heureux, who leads NOAA’s El Niño-Southern Oscillation team. She emphasized that next winter is still far off, so these predictions will likely become much clearer over the coming months. The warm water displacement linked to El Niño can trigger powerful winter storms, landslides, and significant flooding across the Pacific Coast and Southwest U.S. Further afield, it can delay India’s crucial monsoon season and ignite widespread droughts and devastating wildfires in Australia and Southeast Asia, noted Shang-Ping Xie, a climate scientist at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography. Interestingly, El Niño also influences upper-level wind patterns that tend to suppress hurricane formation in the Atlantic Ocean and Caribbean during the peak summer and fall seasons. Dr. Xie pointed out that instruments have already registered a noticeable warming trend in the equatorial Pacific since January. He stated, ‘The warm surface layer is getting thicker,’ indicating the pattern is already starting to manifest. In 2025, NOAA reported that the heat content in the upper layers of the entire ocean reached an unprecedented fifth consecutive annual record. This ocean heat content is a critical metric for understanding climate change, as our oceans absorb a staggering 90 percent of the planet’s surplus heat. NOAA projects that the likelihood of El Niño developing in the Pacific will increase steadily, rising from 40 percent by June to 60 percent by September. Currently, the Pacific Ocean is exiting a La Niña phase, characterized by cooler waters in the eastern Pacific. As La Niña dissipates, the ocean will enter a neutral state before gradually shifting into a developing El Niño pattern as late summer arrives, according to NOAA.