El Niño of 2026-2027 development

2026-11-07

The ongoing El Niño has received exceptional attention in the Finnish media. Many media houses have an alarmist approach to climate change on their agenda, which is easily recognizable by the fact that they talk about the climate crisis. I have updated Figure 1 with the ONI and RONI values, which are indicators of the ENSO phenomenon.

September's ONI value was 2.46 and the RONI value was 1.97 - quite a difference. It is clear that the ONI value will exceed 2.59, which is the highest measured so far in December 2015. In addition to the history of the Niño 3.4 area, the RONI value also takes into account the general warming of the oceans, and it is now considered a better indicator than the ONI value. The September RONI value of the current El Niño was still slightly below the 1997-98 El Niño.

Figure 2 shows the development of the temperature trend in the Niño 3.4 region, shown by the red line at the top. I have put a black arrow line to describe the determination of the ONI value in September; it is calculated as the average of August-October from the difference between the measured temperature in the Niño 3.4 area and the historical temperature in the area. History shows that the peak of El Niño falls in December, and that is where the name "little boy" (El Niño) comes from.

The orange arrow line is an estimate of what the ONI value for December can look like. The prerequisite for this is that the temperature in the Niño 3.4 region remains at its current value until about the end of January.

 The most significant effects of El Niño 2026-27 observed so far

El Niño increases the number of hurricanes in the Pacific Ocean and decreases the number of hurricanes that form in the Atlantic. According to statistics maintained since 1951, an average of 8 hurricanes are generated in the Pacific Ocean per year, with a minimum of 2 and a maximum of 16 in 1992. This year, there have already been 13 hurricanes classified as hurricanes.

An average of 7 hurricanes occur in the Atlantic Ocean each year; the maximum number has been 15 in 2005, and the minimum number since 1951 has been 2. This year, 1 hurricane-category storm has been registered. The Atlantic hurricane season usually ends by the end of November.

Alarmists have claimed that hurricanes are becoming more and more frequent as a result of global warming, and that their intensity is also increasing because they get their energy from the warm sea surface. Nowhere else in the world do statistics show such a development. The reason is that the formation and intensity of a hurricane are significantly affected by the so-called wind shear. It is caused by the temperature difference between the equatorial and northern sea areas. The northern sea area has warmed up, but the equatorial area has not warmed significantly. The most destructive hurricanes have hit the coasts of Europe before the industrial era, proving that warming sea levels are not a sufficient explanation for the formation and intensity of hurricanes.

El Niño brings heavy rainfall to the west coast of the United States, which is called the "atmospheric river" because the phenomenon brings heavy rain in a river-like flow from the humid equatorial region to the southwestern United States. This has already happened in the Colorado River basin, which has suffered from severe drought, and the water basins in the area have been drying up. Now the basins are filling up quickly – thanks to this super El Niño.

This atmospheric river phenomenon brought heavy rainfall to California in 2017 after El Niño 2015-16. As a result, the Oroville dam reservoir filled up, and water began to flow into the dam's emergency spillway for the first time in history, which immediately began to collapse due to erosion, and 190,000 people had to be evacuated for fear of the dam structure collapsing. The dam's main drainage hole was badly damaged, and a huge hole was torn into it. It remains to be seen if there will be such dramatic effects now. It can rain even in Southern California, even though the song claims "It never rains in Southern California".

The effect of El Niño is also considered to be the breaking of the polar vortex, and researchers have stated that this happened just a couple of days ago, and it is historically early. It may have strong effects on the weather in the Finnish winter season. Since this article is already too long, I will write about it separately.