LONDON: This year’s El Nino weather pattern will be the biggest in over a century and could make 2027 the hottest year globally, Britain’s national weather agency predicted on Friday.
An El Nino weather event happens when warming sea surface temperatures in the tropical eastern Pacific trigger worldwide changes in winds, atmospheric pressure and rainfall, as well as higher global temperatures overall.
Adam Scaife, head of long-range forecasting at the weather agency, told the BBC: “We are expecting the biggest El Nino for over a century, peaking at something over three degrees — that is unheard of in modern climate records.”
This means Pacific water would heat up more than 3C above the norm in the coming months.
El Nino occurs when water temperatures rise at least 0.5C above the baseline. While it is part of a natural cycle, scientists agree climate change increases its impacts.
A record El Nino would be “adding to the stresses of climate change” following a summer of heatwaves across Europe, the Met Office said in a blog.
Temperatures in the Pacific region are currently running about 2.6C above a rolling 30-year average, according to the Climate Brink dashboard based on data from the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.
The dashboard also aggregates forecasts that put El Nino on course to peak at a 3.9C anomaly this November -- well above a 3C anomaly detected in 2015.
If the forecast is accurate, then 2026 “will far exceed our recent experience of El Nino and its worldwide climate influences”, said the physicist who specialises in climate modelling.
“I have never seen an El Nino signal this intense in our forecasts,” he added, with even a 2C rise considered a “really big event”.
El Nino typically results in drier conditions across southeast Asia, Australia, southern Africa, and northern Brazil, and wetter conditions in the Horn of Africa, the southern United States, Peru and Ecuador.
2027 likely hottest ever
Since El Nino events drive up the global average temperature, 2027 is now “very likely to replace 2024 as the warmest year on record”, said Nick Dunstone, another Met Office scientist.
In 2024, global temperatures exceeded 1.5C above the preindustrial period, the limit set by international commitments to curb global warming.
Last year was the third hottest on record.
The British forecast for a very strong El Nino was in line with other forecasts: Carlo Buontempo, director of the European Union’s Copernicus Climate Change Service, told AFP in January that 2026 could be “another record-breaking year”.
Published in Dawn, August 22nd, 2026
