NOAA: 69% Odds El Nino Breaks All Records

NOAA's Climate Prediction Center says the El Niño now building in the Pacific has a 69% chance of becoming the strongest on record, a report released Thursday, Aug. 13, said.

The same update puts the odds above 90% that the event reaches "very strong" status during the fall and winter of 2026-27, according to the Climate Prediction Center report as described by USA TODAY.

For Americans, the practical stakes are a quieter Atlantic hurricane season, a wetter winter across the southern tier of the country, and a milder one from the Pacific Northwest to the Great Lakes.

The Numbers

Sea-surface temperatures in the eastern equatorial Pacific ran more than 3.6 degrees above average over the past month, the Climate Prediction Center said — the threshold that qualifies an event as "very strong."

NOAA forecasters expect the anomaly in the benchmark Niño region to exceed 2.5 degrees Celsius (about 4.5 degrees Fahrenheit) at its peak, measured over a three-month span to strip out short-term wobbles, CNN reported.

No El Niño in the modern record has run warmer than 4.5 degrees above baseline, the Los Angeles Times reported. The 69% figure is the chance this one reaches or passes that mark.

NOAA also uses a newer yardstick, the Relative Oceanic Niño Index, which discounts the long-term warming of the background ocean. The record on that index was set in 1982-83 at 4.32 degrees above baseline, per the Los Angeles Times. Even with that handicap applied, CNN reported, this event is on track to be unprecedented.

For October through December, the Climate Prediction Center forecasts a 95% chance the event is "very strong" and a 5% chance it is merely "strong."

What It Means for the US

El Niño typically boosts hurricane activity in the Pacific basin and suppresses it in the Atlantic. That has held this year, USA TODAY reported — the Pacific has been active and the Atlantic quiet, though the Atlantic is picking up as the season approaches its peak.

Beyond hurricanes, El Niño usually has little effect on US summer weather, NOAA says. It is the colder months where it dominates: the southern third of the country typically sees wetter-than-average conditions, while the northern third sees raised odds of below-normal precipitation.

"El Niño winters are typically warmer across the continental United States, especially from the Pacific Northwest to the Great Lakes," Matthew Rosencrans, NOAA's lead hurricane seasonal forecaster, said in an email to USA TODAY. He added that the warmth can reach farther down the West Coast and into the Southeast, but those signals are "much less certain."

California officials are bracing for a wet and potentially destructive winter, the Los Angeles Times reported. Of the three other powerful El Niños since 1950 — 1982-83, 1997-98 and 2015-16 — two brought above-average rain to Southern California. The 2015-16 event did not, despite being very strong in the ocean, and was instead blamed for record beach erosion along the coast.