A Super El Niño looks likely this year. Here’s how to limit the worst of its deadly heat. I found this threatening claim not from some sensational news outlet or attention-seeking meteorological organization (although those groups are saying the same). Instead, it’s the headline from a Council on Foreign Relations article.
What does a think tank better known for writing about geopolitics care about El Niño? Turns out, quite a bit. That’s because especially strong El Niño conditions affect life and wellbeing for billions of people. Strong El Niño events can stress national economies on a scale that’s much underappreciated, recently being attributed to global income losses in the trillions.[1] And economic stress, especially affecting food production and prices, has been causally linked to an increased frequency of civil conflict (although any definitive El Niño-leads-to-more conflict link remains hotly debated among researchers).
This article doesn’t focus on geopolitics. Instead, we’ll move beyond news headlines and dive into the science of El Niño, the most significant global process affecting the planet’s year-to-year temperature variability. We’ll discuss the coming ‘super’ El Niño’s probable economic effects in the U.S. and why it’s important to prepare yourself and your workforce for the coming extreme heat.
El Niño: Beyond the Headlines
Most news about El Niño treats it like this: El Niño is the periodic increase in sea surface temperatures in the tropical Pacific Ocean, linked to an increase in global temperature. True, but simplified. At the basic level, El Niño is about energy redistribution on a global scale.
En Niño is one phase (the “positive”, or warm phase) of a cycle called the El Niño Southern Oscillation, or ENSO, that occurs along the equator in the Pacific Ocean. Normally, winds blow east to west across the tropical Pacific, pushing warm surface water with them. That warmer water piles up in the Western Pacific near Indonesia and the Philippines, making the ocean there several degrees warmer than the eastern Pacific off South America. As surface water is pushed west, colder water wells up from the deep ocean along the coast of South America to replace it.
The overall effect of the east-west temperature difference reinforces a loop known as the Bjerknes feedback and stores warmer water below the surface in the Pacific Ocean. That “warm water storage” part is key to understanding why El Niño matters for us.
For our purposes, think of these cycles as a planet-scale thermal battery, charging during La Niña and discharging during El Niño. During the La Niña phase (the cooler, “negative” phase opposite El Niño), the Pacific Ocean stores heat, primarily from solar radiation. We are talking about huge quantities of heat. Last year, all oceans together absorbed a record 23 zetta joules of heat. (A zetta joule (ZJ) is a one followed by twenty-one zeros; for some perhaps irrelevant context, 23 ZJs is approximately the energy required to melt ice in about 4.5 quadrillion frozen ICEPLATES®). The Pacific's ENSO-specific storage is only a part of that global total, but it's the piece that drives the year-to-year temperature variability we're about to discuss.
Nature seeks balance, and heat stored during La Niña doesn’t stay in the ocean forever. Excess thermal energy is discharged during El Niño. It’s redistributed into the atmosphere[2] and, eventually, radiated back into space. The release of this stored heat is why global air temperatures often spike during El Niño. El Niño is actually the planet’s single most significant mechanism to cool off.
But (and this is why it is important for us) while the planet’s overall net heat balance decreases during El Niño, we don’t experience it that way, because that thermal energy first passes into the atmosphere. What we feel are strongly linked increases in global air temperature. For every 1.8oF of ocean warming in the central Pacific (specifically an area of the central Pacific called “Niño 3.4”), global average temperatures rise a bit more than a tenth of a degree.
Tenths of a degree seem tiny, but the effect of small average increases can be extremely outsized. In an earlier article, we explored how seemingly small increases to average global temperature create outsized changes in really hot temperature extremes. A warmer global average temperature doesn’t shift the distribution of all temperatures slightly warmer; instead, really hot days tend to occur more frequently, while cooler and “average” days are less common than they once were (NASA has a great animation of this phenomenon here).[3] The frequency and intensity of the hottest days increase, leading to longer and more extreme heatwaves.
This Time Is Different
As of early July 2026, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s classification system gave the current El Niño event a 97% chance of persisting through early spring of next year, and an 81% chance that October through December will see “very strong” conditions. The Australian Bureau of Meteorology’s (BOM) outlook, using a slightly different methodology, points to the same. The BOM forecasts a 100% chance of El Niño conditions between August and the end of this year (forecasts almost never have that kind of certainty!). In fact, the “Relative Niño 3.4 index used by the Australian BOM estimates a ~6oF above average ocean temperature (in the Niño 3.4 area)[4] by October through December. On the BOM’s scale, this predicts the current El Niño will be the hottest in the 75-year record… by a wide margin.
El Niño projections from the Australian Bureau of Meteorology, using their Relative Niño 3.4 index. An El Niño event was declared in June when this index exceeded the ~1.5°F threshold. By December, the forecast average is projected to reach ~6oF (3.4oC). On this measure, the current El Niño will exceed every event in the 75-year record. Note the chart's scale is in Celsius; I convert to Fahrenheit in the text.
NOAA and Australian meteorologists aren’t alone in their prediction. Dr. Hausfather, acclaimed climatologist and energy systems analyst, writes that the coming El Niño might not just be record setting. In his own words, it is shaping up to be “the strongest by a truly mind-blowing margin”.
For comparison, the 2015 El Niño event (the strongest on record, at least so far[5]) saw ocean temperatures in the Niño 3.4 region up to 5oF above baseline. It’s no coincidence the 2015 El Niño preceded the heat of 2016, at the time the hottest year ever recorded. Likewise, a strong El Niño in 2023-2024 (ocean temperatures in Niño 3.4 reached ~3.8oF above baseline) was followed by 2024, currently the hottest year on record.
Timing is Everything
Readers in the Northern Hemisphere have another factor to contend with. Releasing so much thermal energy into air takes time, so there is a delay between maximum ocean temperature (i.e., when El Niño spikes) and atmospheric warming. El Niño conditions are typically strongest in late fall and early winter, but maximum atmospheric warming follows several months later, just in time to add heat to the start of a Northern Hemisphere summer.
How can we know that El Niño will really impact our summer almost a year from now? After all, your personal weather forecast isn’t good much beyond ten days. However, because ENSO cycles are a well-understood global phenomenon, regional, probabilistic forecasts can be made. Summer 2027 might be nearly a year away, but already some pretty striking predictions for impacts to the U.S. are being made.
Summer 2027 temperature outlook as of July 2026. Source: National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.
The most striking finding from the national summer 2027 temperature prediction: No location in the U.S. is predicted to experience below-average summer temperatures in 2027! The most extreme temperature increases are likely in the Western part of the U.S., shown in the above prediction and as observed in our historical record from past El Niño events.
The last El Niño developed through 2023 and peaked that winter, persisting into May 2024. Phoenix set records on both sides of that peak: in summer 2023, while the El Niño was still strengthening, the city ran a streak of 31 consecutive days at or above 110°F, shattering the previous record of 18 consecutive days, and finished the year with 54 total days that hot. The following year broke that record again; 2024 ended with an astonishing 70 days at or above 110°F. Daily temperatures across Arizona, New Mexico, and parts of California registered some of the hottest readings recorded anywhere on the planet across both summers.
The 2023-2024 El Niño, despite creating such intense conditions in the Southwest, wasn’t particularly exceptional. From the early 2027 summer forecast, we might reasonably expect some of these recent extreme records to be broken again, especially if the 2026-2027 El Niño is as strong as some forecasters predict. Temperature records are already falling this year, and the current El Niño is just getting warmed up. A heatwave hit Washington DC, leading to 103oF on July 4th weekend, a new record, complicating and even canceling the Nation’s 250th birthday celebrations across the East Coast.
El Niño on a hotter baseline.
One of the most concerning aspects of recent El Niño conditions isn’t that they are getting more frequent (they aren’t – El Niño still occurs about every 2-7 years). After all, El Niño is a natural cycle, one that existed long before thermometers were around to measure it. What’s different now is that they occur as our global temperature baseline is also rising.
El Niño in 2015-16 (or the earlier 1997-98 event) was measurably stronger than the most recent cycle in 2023-24, but 2024 was the hottest year on record. El Niño isn’t necessarily required to create extreme temperatures globally; the ten hottest years on record all occurred in the last decade, even as ENSO cycled between El Niño and La Niña. But the hottest of these last ten years occurred during and after El Niño.
Because it’s starting on top of an ever-increasing temperature baseline, even a relatively weak El Niño can push global temperatures above any previous record… and the current El Niño, as we’ve seen, is likely to be incredibly strong. Given current conditions, leading scientists are already predicting a more than 90% chance that 2027 will be the hottest year on in recorded history.
Preparation Now
With El Niño projected to run strong this year, 2027 is shaping up to be a real scorcher, almost certain to set a new global temperature record (as hinted in the preceding paragraph, I’ve seen sober, reliable reports giving 2027 a 91% chance of setting a new record). Commodity market strategists are especially focused on 2027, with some experts believing that markets are underestimating the economic impact of likely extreme weather driven by El Niño.
Qore Performance users probably aren’t commodity market traders, but extreme heat’s impact on labor overall affects many other sectors of the economy and is already projected to cost an average of $100 billion (and growing) in lost labor productivity in the U.S. every year. One recent report highlights the cost to places like Texas (with relatively high levels of outdoor work in construction, oil and gas, and agriculture), California (especially in agricultural regions towards the south), and Florida (with impacts to outdoor service and tourism workers).
Productivity losses in the heat are a fact, and we can confidently predict next year will bring unprecedented heat. Now is the time to plan for mitigating that threat. It’s the challenge Qore Performance is designed to address. Qore Performance equipment is for anyone engaged in outdoor work looking to stay a bit cooler and a bit more productive in the heat. El Niño is already pushing 2026 temperatures into record territory and 2027 will be hotter still. The question isn't whether extreme heat is coming. It's whether you and your team are wearing the right gear when it does.
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About the author: Dr. Erik Patton holds a PhD from Duke University where he conducted research on the challenges rising temperatures pose for military training. An Army veteran, Erik has served in a variety of extreme climates ranging from deserts in the U.S. Southwest and Middle East (120oF) to Arctic conditions in central Alaska (-42oF).
[1] Specifically, $4.1 trillion from a 1982-83 strong El Niño event and $5.7 trillion from a 1997-1998 event.
[2] Mostly through the evaporation of the ocean surface (a cooling process, just like sweat evaporation cools the skin). Evaporated surface water condenses as clouds in the air. Condensation is the opposite of evaporation, with heat being released into the air (as opposed to drawn away from the skin, like in sweat evaporation).
[3] In slightly more technical terms, the hot tail of the temperature distribution curve gets fatter.
[4] The Niño 3.4 region is what is generally used to define ENSO conditions.
[5] The 1877-1878 El Niño might have been slightly stronger, but records from this time come from less reliable ship data.
