Sea-surface temperatures in the eastern Pacific have warmed to 2 degrees Celsius above average, and NOAA's Climate Prediction Center now puts the odds at 69 percent that this El Nino will exceed every event on record back to 1950. [1] The current record for warming in any three-month window is 2.5 degrees Celsius above average. Models suggest this event could beat it before the year is out.
That single number, buried in an August 13 forecast update from The Weather Channel, is the thread connecting a season of storms that most local coverage has treated as unrelated. A hurricane weakening off the Yucatan gets covered as a hurricane story. A drought easing in the Caribbean gets covered as a drought story. NOAA's data says both are downstream of the same event, and its strength is still climbing.
El Nino works by shifting where heat and moisture concentrate in the tropical atmosphere, and a strong one rearranges hurricane season on both sides of the Pacific-Atlantic divide. In the Atlantic basin, and especially the Caribbean Sea, a strong El Nino raises wind shear to levels that can rip a storm apart before it organizes. [1] Forecasters have already logged record-strong wind shear over the Caribbean this month, and systems that do form are finding only small pockets of favorable wind elsewhere, the way Tropical Storm Cristobal did earlier in August by shifting north. [1] The same El Nino also produces more sinking, drying air over the Atlantic basin, suppressing the thunderstorm activity that feeds tropical development in the first place.
The Pacific tells the opposite story. Tropical activity in both the eastern and western Pacific has run near or above average this season, including two Category 5 storms, Hurricane Genevieve and Super Typhoon Dolphin. [1] The Accumulated Cyclone Energy index, which weights storm count by strength and duration, shows the western Pacific running at nearly double its average activity while the Atlantic sits at roughly a quarter of normal. NOAA meteorologists describe it as a seesaw: one basin's quiet is the other basin's overdrive, and the fulcrum is the same warming water. [1]
The consequences extend past this hurricane season. A strong El Nino typically turbocharges the subtropical branch of the jet stream come winter, which tends to mean a wetter winter across the southern United States, from California and the Desert Southwest through Florida and the Southeast, and potentially more snow where the air runs cold enough. [1] The northern United States, by contrast, usually gets a milder, drier winter under a strong El Nino, which would mean lower heating bills from the Northwest through the Northern Plains and Midwest. Hawaii tends to see a rainier winter before drying out sharply the following year. [1]
None of this is happening in isolation from the rest of 2026's climate record. Earth just tied its hottest month on record this August, a milestone NOAA attributes in part to the heat this El Nino is transferring into the atmosphere, and fires already burning in Indonesia are being linked to the sinking, warming air the pattern produces there. [1] Weather.com's own coverage treats these as adjacent bullet points in a single explainer rather than a causal chain, the standard service-journalism format for a story whose real news is the mechanism, not any single day's forecast.
On X, meteorologists are tracking the model runs themselves as the story, refreshed model to model rather than storm to storm. Meteorologist Jeff Berardelli posted in early August that a new run of the North American Multi-Model Ensemble had joined the European model in projecting the Nino 3.4 region — the standard benchmark patch of equatorial Pacific water — to peak near 4 degrees Celsius above average around November, calling the month-over-month shift in the forecasts "remarkable." That is comfortably past the 2.5-degree threshold that currently defines a record event, and it is why NOAA's own 69 percent probability has held up rather than faded as August has worn on. [1]
Forecasters caution that El Nino is one influence on global weather, not the only one, and that its typical impacts, wetter southern winters, drier northern ones, suppressed Atlantic hurricanes, amplified Pacific ones, become more reliable the stronger the event gets. [1] That reliability is precisely what makes this month's numbers worth reading together rather than apart. The Weather Channel plans its own first stab at a formal fall outlook later this week, but the underlying mechanism, a Pacific warming faster and further than any El Nino since record-keeping began, is not waiting for that outlook to already be reshaping the season. [1]
-- DARA OSEI, London