*2026 El Niño Ahead by a Mile* It’s remarkable for us scientists to witness El Niño’s evolution. If you had asked us if something like this was possible a year ago, it would have probably been a definitive no. But here we are… already more than 1C (and 3 months) ahead of the next strongest episode in 1997. This week we breached +2.5°C sea surface temperature anomaly in the East-Central Tropical Pacific. That alone qualifies this as an elite event. But we still have 4 months of temperature rise to go. So we are headed into outer space. For folks just getting acquainted with El Niño, it’s a warming of the Eastern Tropical Pacific waters. It’s a natural cycle, but it appears this one is boosted by excess heat now being stored in the oceans. El Niño events essentially act as the exhaust of the Ocean, a way to cool itself, at the expense of the atmosphere. So the end result is we see lots of heat injected into the climate system causing all kinds of climate chaos like record #heatwaves, record #wildfires, record #typhoons in the Pacific, and possibly record quiet #hurricanes in the Atlantic (fingers crossed). Come winter it’s gonna be as active as it gets in the US South, so unfortunately we pay the price for a quiet hurricane season. For perspective here’s where the other recent Super El Nino’s were by now: * 1982: +0.80°C * 1997: +1.50°C * 2015: +1.44°C * 2023: +1.04°C * 2026: +2.55°C #elniño #elnino

Massive Firenado. What a disaster :(