First, hurricane season is lurching towards us, and as of Friday (15 May) the National Hurricane Center and the Central Pacific Hurricane Center have started their outlooks. The official season starts May 15th in the Pacific, but in the Atlantic on June 1st. As of this morning, none of the centers (including the Navy/Air Force Joint Typhoon Warning Center, that does outlooks year-round) are monitoring anything …
I did a comprehensive post last year with links to resources for the season. Please take a look (click to teleport) if you need a refresher. Also did a a longish post on how to monitor hurricanes, so click on this link to see that article.
The latest weather-hype seems to be that the seasonal outlook is for a strong El Niño for this summer and fall. Again, anything much over a week to 10 days is really an outlook rather than a forecast; maybe that’s pedantic, but I think it helps keep in mind the uncertainty in modeling the atmosphere as we go out in time. That said, seasonal climate predictions have been getting better in recent years, as long as you understand these are for general trends rather than specific conditions because the weather on any given day is a delicate balance between a lot of factors both small and large scale.
Are you doomed? Well, if you have been reading this blog for long you know you are in fact doomed, just probably not from what’s trending on CNN, Facebook, or TikTok. First let’s take a look at just what the ENSO cycle is, and what the outlook is for this year.
It is important to understand there are several global cycles in our atmosphere on a two to 10 year period. The most famous of these is the El Niño – Southern Oscillation or ENSO cycle, which tends to be on a five to seven year cycle. It is based on monitoring the ocean temperatures in the central Pacific, since the ocean temperature is related to the strength of the winds driving the ocean currents. Here is a link to a NOAA page with more.
The way ENSO is calculated is based on the average temperatures over four regions (Niño 1 to 4):
While each of these areas is calculated, the most commonly used metric is NINO 3.4, a combination of parts of zone 3 and 4. If the average temperature of NINO3.4 is less than -0.5 degrees C below the long term average, we are in “La Niña” conditions, if between -0.5 and +0.5, it is called ENSO Neutral conditions, and if temperatures are more that 0.5C above average, it is called an El Niño.
The technical term for the deviation from normal is the Sea Surface Temperature Anomaly (SST Anomaly), and events are classified as weak moderate, strong, or very strong depending on the anomaly.
- 0.5 to 0.9: Weak
- 1.0 to 1.4: Moderate
- 1.5 to 1.9: Strong
- Over 2.0: Very Strong
The models are showing a potentially Strong to Very Strong event the second half this year. Here is a plot of 16 forecast ensemble members from the US Climate Forecast System. Note all of them show an El Niño, only one stays weak:
The other major climate models are showing similar trends. The official word from NOAA as of Thursday May 14th is: El Niño is likely to emerge soon (82% chance in May-July 2026) and continue through Northern Hemisphere winter 2026-27 (96% chance in December 2026 – February 2027). They go on to put the probabilities of a Strong or Very Strong about 67%:
I want to draw your attention to the fine print in the lower right hand corner: Stronger events do not always mean bigger weather and climate impacts. It can make some impacts more likely but it’s not a sure thing. A bit more caution about models: they tend to break down over extreme events, by either over or underestimating them, and it’s impossible to tell which until it’s already done. There are a lot of technical reasons for this, I’ll spare you the math, but the bottom line is that with a model it’s difficult/impossible to distinguish between a 90th and a 99th percentile event. In other words we can see it looks stronger than usual, but super or record setting? The models aren’t always great guide for that.
Note that “super” is a media term, the official classification is above, so when you read articles like this one from CNN put your hype filter on and realize that while this is looking to be stronger than normal it’s really not something to panic over at this point. That said, there can be impacts, as this NOAA article outlines. But at this point there is lots of other stuff to worry about like gas prices and the looming spike in food costs due to the war against Iran. As we get in to summer we will see what develops.
For coastal GA, some kind of El Niño might be good if it brings some good soaking rain in (although as with most things too much of a good thing can be a problem).
Here’s the prediction for this summer, including the ENSO cycle forecast:
Finally, the El Niño prediction for this year is a big part of the reason why the normal hurricane season hype has been missing this spring, because El Niño years tend to have lower than normal numbers of hurricanes – but beware: all it takes is one to hit you and it’s a bad year. 1992 was a quiet year, well, aside from Andrew whacking South Florida and nearly collapsing the insurance industry. My advice is the same as it is every year: ignore the seasonal forecasts, do your pre-season planning, get your emergency supplies and evacuation plans sorted, and enjoy the Cheetos (restocking periodically) as you wait out the season.
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Thank you from Beaufort- near Frogmore International