El Niño: Meteorologists predict the climate pattern will likely develop by summer

Meteorologists are predicting an El Niño climate pattern will almost certainly develop by summer, and by winter, there’s a two out of three chance that the episode will be strong or very strong, increasing the likelihood of drought, flooding and other natural disasters worldwide.

Across the globe, El Niño’s effects can be highly variable and extreme, from severe drought to intense rains, depending on the season and local geography. In the Northeastern United States, El Niño years don’t tend to generate dramatic changes in temperature or rainfall, but they typically bring fewer and weaker hurricanes.

Those historical patterns, though, are becoming somewhat scrambled by accelerating global warming, climate scientists warn. "There's inherently a ton of uncertainty" in global climate patterns, said Jase Bernhardt, a climatologist at Hofstra University. "And then you throw atop the climate change, it just makes it even more uncertain."

The world climate system cycles naturally between El Niño (warmer) and La Niña (cooler) periods, with neutral periods in between — a pattern that has persisted for thousands of years. These cycles, which scientists call the El Niño-Southern Oscillation, or ENSO, repeat irregularly every two to seven years; each phase generally lasts between nine and 12 months.

La Niña

The most recent La Niña episode, marked by cooler global temperatures on average and generally wetter weather, ended around March 2025. (That means last winter’s cold temperatures and the cool spring are just a matter of normal seasonal variations, experts said, not an effect of these larger cycles.) Since then, the planet’s climate has settled into a neutral phase — neither La Niña nor El Niño.

Over the past several months, trade winds in the Pacific have weakened, allowing warmer waters around the equator to flow east toward the Americas. These are the precise conditions that produce an El Niño episode, with consequences that reach every continent on Earth.

On Thursday, NOAA’s Climate Prediction Center estimated there’s an 92% chance of El Niño conditions developing between June and August. By fall, the likelihood is above 98%.

The previous El Niño of 2023 and 2024 was one of the five strongest on record, according to the World Meteorological Organization. Global temperatures reached a record 1.55 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels, powering both extreme flooding and drought in different regions of Brazil, drought and wildfires in southern Africa, Indonesia and Australia and marine heat waves that caused severe die-offs of coral reefs worldwide.

Effect on Long Island

El Niño "has huge implications for certain regions of the world," Bernhardt said. In the Northeast United States, though, "the connection is a bit more tenuous."

Long Islanders are more likely to feel some effects of El Niño when winter comes, according to Nat Johnson, a meteorologist at NOAA's Geophysical Fluid Dynamics Laboratory, who studies ENSO cycles. "The Northeast tends to experience warmer winters and reduced snowfall" in El Niño years, Johnson wrote to Newsday in an email, though that trend is more pronounced father north.

One fairly clear pattern on the East Coast: Atlantic hurricane seasons in El Niño years historically have been more muted.

But the oceans have grown much warmer with human-caused climate change, and warmer waters generate more and stronger hurricanes. That could counteract El Niño's effect, Bernhardt said.

In 2023, the most recent El Niño hurricane season, there were 20 named storms, more than the 1991-2020 average of 14. And their accumulated cyclone energy scores — a measure of their strength — also exceeded the average.

Effect of global warming

Global warming also may produce more extreme fluctuations between El Niño and La Niña phases. "We have evidence that over the past century, we have experienced increasingly larger swings between ENSO cycles," Johnson wrote. Recent studies suggest that these larger swings are related to increasing greenhouse gas emissions.

Teasing out to what extent anomalies in the weather or natural disasters can be attributed to climate change — and to what extent they should be attributed to ENSO shifts — will be challenging, Johnson cautioned.

"While there is clear evidence that climate change may alter and even amplify the patterns of El Niño effects in some regions," he wrote, the "chaotic variability inherent in our climate" means it could be several decades before scientists can identify how these trends and patterns interact.

This year’s extreme weather will arrive at a time of upheaval at the Federal Emergency Management Agency, the agency charged with assisting communities hit by climate and other disasters. In January, the U.S. Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) fired about 200 front-line FEMA disaster workers — then began to rehire them this month, after a coalition of labor unions, local governments and nonprofits sued the administration, arguing the cuts would undermine the agency’s mission.

So far, 2026 is on track to be one of the hottest years on record. March was the warmest on record in the continental United States, and April was the third warmest.

"Every El Niño is different," Zachary Labe, a climate scientist at the research group Climate Central, said at an online briefing on Thursday. "This is really indicating that we may be headed for a very rare and unusual El Niño event this year."