The Atlantic hurricane season is frequently suppressed during El Niño because El Niño increases vertical wind shear over the tropical Atlantic, making it more difficult for hurricanes to develop.

Global temperature lags ENSO (El Niño/Southern Oscillation) by around three to five months, meaning most of this El Niño event's warming will probably be seen next year.

According to recent modeling, 2027 could become the warmest year on record by some margin due to the delayed warming response from the current strong El Niño event.

In parts of eastern Africa, seasonal rainfall patterns often become more intense during El Niño events.

When the previous video was made, ensemble forecasts showed a wide spread of possible outcomes ranging from moderate to strong El Niño with some outliers hinting at something exceptional, and this range was largely due to the spring predictability barrier.

One striking feature of current El Niño development is not only how warm the tropical Pacific is becoming, but how quickly it's warming, with current forecasts suggesting a remarkably rapid transition from La Niña conditions earlier this year to a potentially very strong El Niño by the end of 2026.

The latest data about El Niño are telling something completely unprecedented in the historical record and 'not in a good way'.

Climate scientist Zeke Hausfather has earned a reputation as one of the more cautious interpreters of climate data who frequently urges journalists and sometimes fellow scientists not to jump to conclusions before evidence is sufficiently robust.

Zeke Hausfather is a Lead Author for the IPCC's Seventh Assessment Report currently in preparation and has contributed to successive IPCC assessment reports.

Over the past month, forecasters obtained another month's worth of ocean temperature measurements, atmospheric observations, and satellite data, which instead of causing the various models to diverge further, has caused them to converge towards the same conclusion that El Niño could be stronger than record El Niño events of 1982-83, 1997-98, and 2015-16.

If current projections are correct, the world is about to witness something that modern climate science has never previously observed: an El Niño potentially stronger than all three record El Niño events of 1982-83, 1997-98, and 2015-16.

During normal years, persistent trade winds blow from east to west across the tropical Pacific, piling warm surface water around Indonesia and northern Australia, which allows colder, nutrient-rich water to rise from the deep ocean along the coast of South America through upwelling, resulting in a Pacific Ocean tilted with warm water in the west and cool water in the east.

Every few years the balance between trade winds and ocean temperature breaks down as trade winds weaken and sometimes reverse, allowing the enormous reservoir of heat built beneath the western Pacific to move back towards South America via equatorial Kelvin waves.

As equatorial Kelvin waves move across the Pacific, they deepen the thermocline, which is the boundary separating warm surface water from the colder ocean beneath, suppressing normal upwelling of cool water along the equator and allowing sea surface temperatures to rise.

Once the Bjerknes Feedback reaches a certain level of intensity, the entire Pacific climate system can reorganize itself surprisingly quickly, which appears to be what has happened over the past few weeks.

Trade winds across parts of the equatorial Pacific have weakened substantially, several powerful downwelling Kelvin waves have propagated eastwards beneath the surface, subsurface heat content across the central and eastern Pacific has increased dramatically, and the multi-model median for peak sea surface temperature anomaly in the Niño 3.4 region currently stands at 3.6 degrees Celsius.

The multi-model median for the current El Niño's peak sea surface temperature anomaly in the Niño 3.4 region is 3.6 degrees Celsius, which is 0.8 degrees Celsius hotter than the previous record of 2.75 degrees Celsius set in 2015-2016.

The 1997-1998 El Niño became the benchmark against which all subsequent events have been measured, causing global coral bleaching at unprecedented levels, huge forest fires in Indonesia that blanketed Southeast Asia in smoke, severe flooding in East Africa, and devastating storms and landslides in Central America, while global average temperatures reached record highs for that time.

Researchers have proposed multiple contributing factors to recent spikes in sea-surface and atmospheric temperatures, including reductions in shipping sulphur emissions, unusually warm oceans across multiple basins, changes in cloud cover, and other feedbacks that scientists are still actively investigating, with no single explanation yet emerged as definitive.

Whatever causes the recent temperature spike, the fact is that the temperature has spiked dramatically in the last two or three years, and that's the baseline from which this El Niño has developed.