June is shaping up to be a month of El Niño news, with a new report out from the World Meteorological Organization today and a much-anticipated update coming from NOAA next Thursday. As Andrew has told us before, this one could cause major disasters around the world, with assuredly significant economic impact (and we'll be tracking it all in the new CNN Weather iPhone app). He's here today with the latest. —Angela

From Andrew Freedman

Sea surface temperature departures from average as of May 31, 2026. This shows the warm anomalies associated with the emerging El Niño in the tropical Pacific Ocean. (University of Maine/Climate Reanalyzer)

We are nearing the onset of the El Niño everyone has been talking about, and it is likely to have major impacts around the world during the coming months, from heat waves to flooding and droughts, the World Meteorological Organization warned this morning.  

The WMO’s report amounts to a notification that the starting gun for El Niño is about to be fired, with the bullet ricocheting worldwide.  

El Niño is a periodic weather pattern in the tropical Pacific Ocean that alters trade winds and features unusually hot waters in the central and eastern Pacific. These changes in winds and ocean temperatures disrupt tropical precipitation patterns, which has knock-on effects on global weather patterns.

El Niños also tend to release huge amounts of heat into the atmosphere and cause the planet to heat up even faster than the background rate from fossil fuel pollution.  

As the WMO states, it is not yet certain how strong this El Niño will become, but the consensus is that a moderate to strong, or even very strong, event is likely on tap for the rest of this year and into early 2027.  

Recent computer model runs show an increase in the odds of a strong to very strong event, referred to colloquially as a “Super” El Niño. Some models even show that one of the strongest El Niño’s on record is about to occur.  

The WMO is projecting hotter-than-average temperatures virtually everywhere on Earth for the Northern Hemisphere’s summer months of June through August. 

El Niño can also be associated with increased rainfall in parts of southern South America, the southern United States, parts of the Horn of Africa and central Asia.

Meanwhile, the same event is likely to create drier conditions in Central America, northern South America, the Caribbean, Australia, Indonesia and parts of southern Asia, according to the WMO.  

Overall, El Niño is expected to increase the odds of extreme events like flooding and droughts and heat waves. 

Climate scientist Zeke Hausfather, who was not involved with the WMO’s predictions, said there is an emerging consensus among the computer models used to predict El Niño that this one will be a significant event.  

“We've seen a pretty consistent increase month-over-month in predicted severity for this year's El Nino event,” he said, cautioning that there is still a lot of disagreement among the models when it comes to forecast details. “The odds of a very strong (“Super”) El Nino are now reasonably high, and it’s even possible that we see a record-setting one,” Hausfather said in an email.  

Experiencing a Super El Niño, in and of itself, would not be unprecedented. Extremely strong events have occurred in the past, including in 2015-16 and 1997-98. It also doesn’t necessarily mean the impacts of El Niño will be worse than normal in all locations.  

And Super El Niño events don’t have extra impacts tacked on to the typical list. A Super El Niño would, however, raise the odds of significant impacts overall.

The strength "is highly significant — whether it is classed as weak, moderate, strong or very strong. Even a moderate El Niño makes some weather and climate extremes more likely,” WMO Secretary-General Celeste Saulo said in a statement. 

One of the most intriguing unknowns of this upcoming El Niño is how it will interact with long-term, human-caused climate change.  

There has never been a Super El Niño at a time when global ocean and air temperatures were already as hot as they are now, and this is bound to alter how the impacts of El Niño manifest. It will almost certainly lead to the new hottest year on record, most likely in 2027.  

“El Niño conditions will pour fuel on the fire of a warming world. Impacts will hit even harder, travel even farther, and cross borders with devastating speed,” said UN Secretary-General António Guterres in a video statement accompanying the WMO forecast. (The WMO is a UN agency.) 

Watch this space, since the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration will issue its next El Niño update on June 11th, and could declare the start of the event.  

—This sizzling CNN story by my colleague Laura Paddison on the record-shattering heat wave in Western Europe last week. Unlike many other stories on this event, Paddison put the heat wave in its climate change context. 

—This unsettling piece from AFP on the brain drain "death spiral" affecting weather and climate research facilities in Colorado as the Trump administration cuts off grant funding and threatens to break up the NSF National Center for Atmospheric Research. 

—A piece in The Conversation about scientists' concerns regarding the continued viability of a global network of ocean monitoring instruments in the face of funding cuts from the U.S. The fear is that this could compromise work to measure how the oceans are heating up in response to human-caused global warming. 

A shelf cloud approaches Frankfurt, Germany, on May 31. This large, low-hanging cloud forms along the leading edge of thunderstorms. (Michael Probst/AP)