Record-breaking El Niño already reshaping global weather patterns

Scientists monitoring the Pacific Ocean have confirmed what they feared: the El Niño building across the tropical waters is now the strongest ever recorded. On September 19, sea surface temperatures in the critical central-eastern Pacific reached 3.05 degrees Celsius above their historical average—a fraction of a degree higher than the previous record set during the powerful 2015 El Niño. The peak of this event has not yet arrived. It is expected to intensify further before the year ends.

El Niño is a natural climate pattern that emerges roughly every two to seven years and typically persists for about twelve months. The mechanism is straightforward in its outline: trade winds that normally push warm water westward across the Pacific weaken or reverse, allowing that heat to spread eastward instead. The ocean releases this accumulated warmth into the atmosphere, raising global temperatures and scrambling weather patterns across the planet. Scientists declare an El Niño when temperatures in the key monitoring region stay consistently half a degree above normal. But strength is measured in different ways. The record now broken—called the Oceanic Niño Index—tracks daily sea surface temperatures against long-term averages. Other measures, like the Relative Oceanic Niño Index, account for the background warming from climate change by comparing the El Niño region to the rest of the tropical oceans. By that alternative measure, the current event has not yet set a record, though scientists expect announcements of further milestones in the coming weeks.

Professor Adam Scaife, head of long-range prediction at the Met Office, said the organization had been warning for months that this El Niño would be unprecedented. "The fact that it has already exceeded previous records—with several weeks to go before it peaks later this year—shows the enormity of this El Niño," he said. Yet he also cautioned that the strength of an El Niño does not automatically translate to proportional impacts on weather. Scientists are still working to understand whether this record-breaking intensity will produce record-breaking consequences.

But the effects are already visible across the globe. India's southwest monsoon has delivered 15 percent less rain than normal through September 22, a typical El Niño signature. The Atlantic hurricane season has produced no storms as of late September—the latest date without a hurricane since satellite monitoring began. Coastal Ecuador, Peru, and the southern United States face heightened flood risk. Brazil, Australia, and Indonesia are bracing for intensified drought and wildfire danger. These weather disruptions ripple outward into crop yields, food supplies, and economic stability in vulnerable regions.

The United Kingdom sits thousands of miles from the tropical Pacific, so El Niño's grip on British weather is less direct than elsewhere. Still, the pattern tends to increase the likelihood of wet, stormy conditions across northwestern Europe in late autumn and early winter. The Met Office's autumn forecast already signals "increased rainfall and storminess," particularly in November and December. The winter of 2015 and 2016, which coincided with the previous record El Niño, brought successive major storms and what experts then called the most extreme flooding on record. El Niño can also correlate with cold spells in late winter, though the link is inconsistent—the Big Freeze of 2009 and 2010 occurred during an El Niño, but the 2006 and 2007 El Niño winter was unseasonably warm.

As this unprecedented event approaches its likely peak in the final months of 2026, scientists will continue tracking its development and measuring its footprint on weather systems worldwide. The full scope of what this record-breaking El Niño will deliver remains uncertain, but the early signals suggest the world is entering a period of significant atmospheric disruption.