Jeff Berardelli is Chief Meteorologist at WFLA Tampa, and my former colleague at Yale Climate Connections.
he strongest El Niño in 150 years? That’s not hype, it’s the actual median forecast right now for the developing event later this year. It could rival — or even surpass — the legendary 1877 El Niño, the strongest on record, which was linked to widespread drought, monsoon failure, and global food crises in parts of Asia, Africa, and South America. But what does that mean today? It means a tremendous amount of excess ocean heat being released into the atmosphere – energy that can rearrange weather patterns around the world. That typically leads to:
Increased flood risk in some regions
More intense/ prolonged heatwaves, drought and fires
A shift in severe storm tracks
And often a suppressed Atlantic hurricane season, but boosted in the East Pacific. Since it’s so huge, when the Pacific talks, the atmosphere listens! But this isn’t 1877… forecasting, infrastructure, and global awareness are far better today. We’ll be better prepared.
Now transparency on the science: the 1877 3-month Nino 3.4 ocean temp anomaly maxed out at +2.7°C. The latest median forecast for all ensembles in late 2026 is +2.75°C in the Nino 3.4 region. So, it may be stronger. Here’s the caveat: that region is now approx .75 – 1°C warmer than it was in 1855, so some of the heat building up there is on top of a baseline which is already warmer today.
So in absolutes… this will probably rival 1877, but relatively speaking due to global warming, the event will likely fall short and thus its global impacts may not rise to that level. That’s why we now have the RONI (index) which accounts for our new warmed World. (Pictured here is the October NMME with a region of +3-4°C over the East Tropical Pacific) Will certainly be interesting to watch from a scientific perspective.
In that Tucker Carlson interview with Jeffrey Sachs, Sachs pointed out that the 1973 energy crisis overlapped a big El Niño, and that there were famines due to reduced crop yields.
https://psl.noaa.gov/enso/climaterisks/years/top24enso.html
The shortage of fuel and fertilizer from Stupid War alone would harm global agriculture, but the forecast strong El Niño will likely lead to near-famine conditions.
From the Wikipedia link to Cormac Ó Gráda’s Famine: A Short History:
“The extreme weather produced by the El Niño–Southern Oscillation (ENSO) of 1876–77 gave rise to the most deadly famines of the nineteenth century. As with all ENSOs, winds driving warm water westward across the southern Pacific Ocean provided the spur, and the resultant low air pressure led to extensive rainfall over the surrounding countries in Southeast Asia and Australasia. In due course, the area of low pressure shifted back east, causing drought in Southeast Asia and heavy rainfalls in the tropical parts of the Americas. The shift almost simultaneously produced droughts farther east, in Brazil and southern Africa. The combination of extreme droughts and monsoons led to millions of deaths under hellish conditions. Another El Niño followed in 1898, wreaking further havoc in India and Brazil’s Nordeste.
The impact of the late nineteenth-century ENSOs is well-known, but recent research has uncovered several more such synchronized climatic assaults. Examples include the great drought-famine of 1743–44, which devastated agricultural production across northern China, and the 1982–83 ENSO that sparked off the Ethiopian famine of 1984–85. El Niño struck again as recently as 1997. Yet the impact of these strikes was mild compared to those of the late 1870s and late 1890s.”