El Niño is officially here, and scientists say it will be particularly strong with widespread impacts

El Niño, nature’s chaotic climate agent, has formed in a warmed-up Pacific Ocean and is expected to grow to historic strength, meteorologists said Thursday.

Experts said the El Niño, a natural warming cycle, should further heat a globe already warming from fossil fuel pollution and will likely turbocharge extreme weather across the planet. Meteorologists forecast it will rival — or exceed — a record El Niño that began in 1997 and helped trigger billions of dollars in damage from heat waves, floods, droughts, tornadoes and wildfires.

The U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) officially confirmed the existence of the El Niño, which is a warming of the Pacific near the equator that affects weather patterns across the globe.

NOAA’s announcement said there’s a 63 per cent chance that the El Niño will get so intense this late fall and early winter that it “would rank among the largest El Niño events in the historical record going back to 1950.”

The warm, deep waters of an El Niño affect weather patterns by bringing “a lot of extra heat to the surface, fuelling a lot of extreme events for a lot of places around the world,” said Clark University climate scientist Abby Frazier.

She said, especially in the Pacific, “it can get dire very quickly.”

United Nations Secretary General Antonio Guterres described El Niño as an “urgent climate warning.”

“El Niño conditions will pour fuel on the fire of a warming world,” Guterres said in a video message.

Impacts spawn winners and losers

The weather pattern’s effects vary by region. El Niño often dampens — but doesn’t eliminate — Atlantic hurricane season activity, but increases it in the Pacific. So while the U.S. East and Gulf coasts may get a break, Hawaii and other islands are more in danger, Frazier said.

The drought-stricken Middle East could benefit, climate scientists said. Other places are looking at more danger. Parts of western South America — where the first El Niños were noticed decades ago — often get heavy rain and floods, along with an extra warm summer. India faces more intense heat waves, while drought, wildfires and heat threaten Australia.

Northeastern Africa is likely going to get weather whiplash from intense drought to dangerously heavy rains, said Columbia University climate scientist and El Niño expert Muhammad Azhar Ehsan.

In Canada, the effects are typically felt in the winter, bringing milder temperatures.

In the U.S., El Niños can cause more intense storms with heavier rainfall in the south, but they also tend to generally benefit the U.S. agriculture industry, said Jon Gottschalck, operational branch chief at NOAA’s Climate Prediction Center.

The northern Rockies and Southwest — where there’s an “off the charts” snow drought — could get some strong summer rains, Gottschalck said. The biggest effect in the U.S. is often in the winter, when the south can get wetter and the Pacific Northwest warmer and drier.

Strong early signs

The weather extremes caused by an El Niño also depend on when it develops.

Usually El Niños form in the summer, peak in the late fall or early winter and peter out the next spring, scientists said.

However, Ehsan’s team forecasts that this El Niño will peak a month or two earlier based on strong early signs from recent weeks. Princeton University climate scientist Gabriel Vecchi said large El Niños like these also tend to last longer.

The early indications — including warmer water pushing toward the surface of the Pacific — have been so strong and noticeable that forecasters have all been predicting the same ultra strong El Niño, Vecchi said, adding that El Niño forecasts often are all over the place at this time of year.

Scientists predict stronger El Niños as the world warms from the burning of coal, oil and gas, Frazier and others said. But she said it is too early to say if this El Niño is part of that.

“Instead of scared, we can ask people to be prepared,” Columbia’s Ehsan said.