Everything points to El Niño being a record breaker

No other El Niño event in history has been as anticipated as the current one, which formed in June, and none has been forecast as far in advance to reach record levels, heralding ominous consequences for the southern African region as well as many other regions around the world.

This state of affairs speaks to the consistency of the forecasts, its relatively early detection, improved modelling and data collection, and growing awareness about the climate in an age when its rapid change, caused mostly by fossil fuel usage, is high on the public’s radar screen.

“We’ve never had a forecast of an El Niño that was so strong and so consistent across models,” said Dr Tim Stockdale, an El Niño expert at the European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts, during an online media briefing. “I’ve been doing this for 35 years and what the models are forecasting is extreme. I would expect it to break records.”

The centre, an intergovernmental organisation supported by most European nations, is known for caution, not hyperbole, so Stockdale’s comments are alarming, to say the least, and come against the backdrop of nearly unanimous forecasts that this will be a whopper of an El Niño.

More accuracy, earlier

El Niño is formed by a warming of surface sea temperatures in the tropical Pacific beyond a certain threshold and the weather patterns it typically unleashes include drought in southern Africa – a cold, hard fact not lost on farmers big and small in this region.

The predictions that this time round it would be on steroids came relatively early and were given credence by the near-unanimity of global forecasters, a wind of warning that lifted coverage and awareness of the looming event.

“The models have slowly improved over time. The observing systems have improved. We’ve had, over the past 20 years, these floats in the sub-surface of the ocean that measure temperature and we know they are really quite important for avoiding certain kinds of false alarms caused by erroneous data, so the data input is better,” Stockdale said.

This improvement has built on insights gained by scientists in the early 1980s that the key to detecting the event lay in gathering data on ocean temperatures in the Pacific Basin.

In the wake of the 1982-83 El Niño, which was the strongest recorded up to that point, the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) deployed 70 ocean buoys across the equatorial Pacific Ocean to harvest such data.

In recent decades, about 3,600 floats, known as the Argo array, have been added to this scientific flotilla. In addition, comparative data that has been compiled, including from satellites that observe the height of the sea surface and the winds above, has been sharpened to a more accurate point.

“We’re better organised in terms of having these multi-model comparisons, which gives us confidence. And generally, the forecast signal has been stronger. It came earlier in the year and there was a very high consistency in going for a large event. It’s that combination that has given a stronger pick-up in reporting and stronger confidence.”

Record-setting June

El Niño is also often referred to as an “anomaly” and the term this time round is no misnomer, especially as climate change is also swirling menacingly in the background. “The reason that the anomaly is bigger is because the temperature of the warmest water is higher than it used to be and that is the global warming signal,” Stockdale said.

The world’s oceans recorded their hottest June on record this year, surpassing the worrying peaks scaled in 2023 and 2024.

“Daily surface sea temperature data exceeded the 2024 levels on 21 June at 20.86°C, marginally above the 20.83°C observed in 2023 and 2024. This new global sea surface temperature record for the time of year was expected with the onset of El Niño conditions in the Equatorial Pacific,” the Copernicus Climate Change Service said.

“Over the past three years, the global ocean outside the polar regions – between the 60°N and 60°S latitude – has been between 0.35°C and 0.73°C warmer than the long-term average, and in June these anomalies have now reached record-high levels for the time of year.”

It all points to the potential for worrying weather records in the months ahead regarding global sea surface and temperatures more widely, as well as for this dreaded El Niño. DM

This story first appeared in our weekly DM168 newspaper, available countrywide for R35.