{"id":2888,"date":"2026-06-17T14:44:00","date_gmt":"2026-06-17T14:44:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/bestusamoverss.com\/?p=2888"},"modified":"2026-06-17T14:44:00","modified_gmt":"2026-06-17T14:44:00","slug":"el-nino-is-here-so-what-does-it-mean","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/bestusamoverss.com\/?p=2888","title":{"rendered":"El Ni\u00f1o is here, so what does it mean?"},"content":{"rendered":"
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This summer was already predicted to be hot for much of the planet, after a near-record year of global heat last year. But El Ni\u00f1o \u2014 the influential weather pattern associated with heat, unlike the cooler La Ni\u00f1a \u2014 has arrived, and it’s raising more alarm.<\/p>

Read more Pakistan ends \u2018luxury tax\u2019 on menstrual products, contraceptives. Will prices drop?<\/a><\/p>

“If we have a big El Ni\u00f1o on top of the long-term warming trend, that just really enhances the probability that we’ll see a new record global mean temperature,” says meteorologist Nat Johnson of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, who is part of the El Ni\u00f1o forecasting team.<\/p>\n

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\"People<\/figure>\n<\/figure>\n
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Weather <\/h3>\n

Forecasters expect slightly fewer hurricanes than usual this year, but the risk of destructive storms is still high<\/h3>\n<\/div>\n\n<\/div>\n\n<\/div>\n\n

Officials from Europe to India and Australia are warning of potential harmful effects, including heat waves and abnormally dry conditions.<\/p>

“Even though it’s a phenomenon that’s rooted in the tropical Pacific,” Johnson says, global jet streams transfer El Ni\u00f1o’s influence far and wide.<\/p>

“Basically, every continent, you’ll see some sort of impact from an El Ni\u00f1o or a La Ni\u00f1a event,” he says. Some of that impact, he says, is economic, from disrupted marine ecosystems and fisheries.<\/p>

El Ni\u00f1o effects start in the tropics and then spread<\/h3>

“The strongest impacts initially will tend to be in the tropical regions,” Johnson says, adding that El Ni\u00f1o tends to bring enhanced drought to a wide band of locations, from Indonesia to the northern Amazon.<\/p>

And this year’s El Ni\u00f1o is shaping up to be a strong one.<\/p>

“There is a 63% chance of a very strong El Ni\u00f1o [from November to January] that would rank among the largest El Ni\u00f1o events in the historical record going back to 1950,” NOAA .<\/p>

“This could be a very significant event in 2026 and lingering into 2027,” says Daniel Swain, a climate scientist with University of California Agriculture and Natural Resources.<\/p>\n

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\"The<\/figure>\n<\/figure>\n
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Short Wave <\/h3>\n

The supertree shielding coastlines and storing carbon<\/h3>\n<\/div>\n\n<\/div>\n\n<\/div>\n\n

A strong El Ni\u00f1o would drive up average global temperatures. The hottest years on record generally occur in years when El Ni\u00f1o is active, because it occurs when the Eastern Pacific is hotter than usual.<\/p>

The U.S. could see a variety of impacts <\/h3>

How a strong El Ni\u00f1o will affect the U.S. is more difficult to predict.<\/p>

“What we experience in our own backyard is usually going to be a combination of many different things, including potentially El Ni\u00f1o,” Johnson says.<\/p>

Read more Taiwan says Chinese pressure over the island is the \u201cnew normal\u201d<\/a><\/p>

It comes down to where the ocean’s heat is released \u2014 and how that affects air circulation, temperatures, and precipitation thousands of miles away.<\/p>

During a typical El Ni\u00f1o, Johnson says, “impacts tend to be strongest in the mid-latitudes and the higher latitudes in the late fall and winter seasons.”<\/p>

The southern U.S. mainland would see wetter weather, while the northernmost contiguous U.S. would see warmer conditions, Johnson says, adding that the Pacific Northwest tends to be drier.<\/p>

On the eastern side of the U.S., El Ni\u00f1o makes it harder for hurricanes to form in the Atlantic Ocean, so they often coincide with less severe hurricane seasons. However, El Ni\u00f1o offers limited protection, since it only takes one major storm making landfall to cause catastrophic damage. Climate change has also caused temperatures in the Atlantic to soar, providing more fuel for storms that do form. And El Ni\u00f1o does nothing to temper storms that form in the Pacific.<\/p>

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\"A<\/figure>\n<\/figure>\n
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NPR’s Climate Solutions Week <\/h3>\n

How one Oregon city has raised a billion dollars for climate change<\/h3>\n<\/div>\n\n<\/div>\n\n<\/div>\n\n
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\"Trump<\/figure>\n<\/figure>\n
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The Sunday Story <\/h3>\n

Trump is rolling back climate solutions. What can cities and states do?<\/h3>\n<\/div>\n\n<\/div>\n\n<\/div>\n\n

How an El Ni\u00f1o forms<\/h3>

El Ni\u00f1o occurs when trade winds weaken, allowing vast volumes of warm ocean water to move from the Eastern Pacific toward the Americas.<\/p>

“Its function in the global earth system is to release heat from the deeper oceans that has been temporarily stored there,” Swain says. “El Ni\u00f1o allows that subducted heat to be unearthed.”<\/p>

That dynamic played out in a big way in 2023 and 2024, when a long, strong El Ni\u00f1o pattern helped shatter global temperature records. 2023 smashed the record for the hottest year ever recorded on Earth, only to be surpassed by temperatures in 2024.<\/p>\n

El Ni\u00f1o, which is a natural cyclic fluctuation, is just one driver of such record-breaking heat. Human-caused global warming from burning fossil fuels is the main reason that the planet is warming. Even without El Ni\u00f1o, last year was in the top three hottest years on record.<\/p>

Read more On a flight home, a stranger helped her understand what came next<\/a><\/p>\n<\/div>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

An El Ni\u00f1o has formed amid the warmer-than-normal waters in the tropical Pacific. Now it’s a question of how intense the phenomenon will be and where effects like heat and drought will strike.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":2883,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[372],"tags":[12,775],"class_list":["post-2888","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-climate","tag-climate-change","tag-el-nino"],"yoast_head":"\nEl Ni\u00f1o is here, so what does it mean? - Best USA Movers<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/bestusamoverss.com\/?p=2888\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"El Ni\u00f1o is here, so what does it mean? - Best USA Movers\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"An El Ni\u00f1o has formed amid the warmer-than-normal waters in the tropical Pacific. 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Colombia has halted electricity exports to neighboring Ecuador as its hydropower plants reach near-critical levels due to a biting drought, the government in Bogota said.The severe dry spell, associated with the El Nino climate phenomenon, has also led to water rationing that is affecting 10 million people in the capital Bogota and surrounding areas. 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