A strengthening El Niño set a new temperature record in a crucial Pacific monitoring region in September, the EU’s climate service reported, offering fresh evidence that the weather pattern is reaching extraordinary intensity.
Forecasters have spent months warning that the event could rank among the strongest ever recorded. Now, a new benchmark has been set before El Niño reaches its anticipated peak later this year.
- Advertisement -
El Niño is the warm phase of a naturally occurring climate cycle. By heating waters across the tropical Pacific, it alters weather patterns around the world, raising the likelihood of drought in some areas and flooding in others while adding to human-driven global warming.
The Copernicus Climate Change Service said sea surface temperatures in Niño3.4, a key El Niño monitoring zone, climbed to an “all-time high” of 29.70C last month.
A dried-up rice field in Indonesia amid a prolonged dry season linked to El Niño
Still, Copernicus cautioned in a statement to AFP that it “cannot yet say that the current El Niño is the strongest ever recorded”.
Comparisons with earlier events have become more difficult because climate change is steadily raising ocean temperatures, making newer El Niño episodes appear more powerful than those in the past.
To account for that broader warming trend, Copernicus has introduced a new index that adjusts for rising tropical ocean temperatures. By that measure, the current event has not yet surpassed earlier El Niño episodes.
Even so, the readings recorded in September “point to an already exceptionally strong El Niño, especially given that the event has not yet reached its peak”, Copernicus told AFP.
Forecasters do not all rely on the same scale when assessing the phenomenon’s strength.
Japan’s weather agency said Friday that El Niño conditions had reached their “strongest intensity on record”, with temperatures in the monitoring region running 4C above normal.
Record ocean temperatures
As El Niño intensified, average global sea surface temperatures reached 21.05C in September, surpassing the previous record of 20.92C set for the month in 2023, according to Copernicus.
The planet also endured its second-warmest September on record, with average surface air temperatures reaching 16.27C, the EU service said.
That made the month 1.63C warmer than the pre-industrial average, defined as the period from 1850 to 1900.
Under the 2015 Paris Agreement, countries pledged to keep global warming “well below” 2C above pre-industrial levels while pursuing efforts to hold the increase to 1.5C, a threshold seen as vital to limiting climate damage.
But the United Nations said in September that the long-term 1.5C goal would be breached within a matter of years.
“We are in a new run of months above 1.5C, and with a strong El Niño still intensifying it is likely to last into 2027,” Copernicus director Carlo Buontempo said in a statement.
He added: “Crossing the Paris Agreement’s long-term limit is only a matter of time. How far we overshoot, and for how long, is still up to us.”
Scientists say cutting greenhouse gas emissions from fossil fuels is essential to shorten the period of warming above 1.5C and help bring global temperatures down as quickly as possible.
Experts have warned that the current El Niño could drive global temperatures to another record in 2027.
The phenomenon raises surface temperatures across the central and eastern equatorial Pacific, setting off worldwide shifts in winds, atmospheric pressure and rainfall.
El Niño generally emerges every two to seven years and lasts between nine and 12 months.
