Godzilla El Niño has already broken temperature records, and Prof Mat Collins of the University of Exeter says the current event has not yet peaked. The sea surface temperature of the El Niño region of the Pacific has already reached 3C above average, putting the eastern Pacific on course for 4C above the average.
Mat Collins said: “It has already broken records and could be on course to be the strongest in a thousand years.” He added: “The sea surface temperature of the El Niño region of the Pacific has already reached the previous 2015 high of 3C above average, which is almost unthinkable.”
University of Exeter on El Niño
El Niño is a natural climate pattern that affects large parts of the world, and it usually occurs every three to seven years. It happens when the normally cool, dry east Pacific becomes warmer and wetter, and it often brings higher temperatures, more droughts and floods. This year’s event comes less than two years after the last El Niño in 2023-24.
Collins said the interaction with climate change is harder to judge. “They are two separate things that layer on top of each other,” he said. “If you’ve already got drought conditions as a result of global warming, then an El Niño is going to exacerbate that.”
Indonesia, Amazon rainforest and the UK
Around the peak of the El Niño, people in Indonesia are likely to face more wildfires, and the Amazon rainforest is likely to face drought. The Indian monsoon has already been weakened because of El Niño, while temperatures are likely to be higher around the Pacific Rim and as far away as the UK.
Meteorologists suggest the UK will see a wetter winter and autumn and possibly a drier, colder spring. That leaves the east Pacific warming trend as the immediate marker to watch, because Collins said the event still has not peaked.
End of the year peak
“It still hasn’t peaked so we won’t know how much higher it will get until the end of the year,” Collins said. He said the present-day frequency of El Niño is quite unusual according to some palaeoclimate reconstructions, even as the planet’s warming baseline complicates comparisons with earlier events. The next clear point of comparison is the end-of-year peak, when the final strength of Godzilla El Niño should be easier to judge.
