What Is A 'Super El Nino' And Should We Be Afraid?

Añadido: 2026-05-09

[00:00:00]El Nino basically you look at the equatorial region between our continent and the western Pacific so right smack in the center of the Pacific closer to the equator there's some areas that they'll watch and all you have to be thinking about is how are those waters responding to the environment and everything that is happening and they're warmer and when they warm up in the specific region of the central Pacific we tend to get wind pattern changes and wind pattern as you know drives weather pretty much right in an El Nino situation the trade winds would usually push the warmer waters closer to us to the western side of the Pacific well we start to lose those trade winds and the water stays warm closer to us and in the Pacific and what that does is rising air more evaporation you got more in the way of thunderstorms that develop and those thunderstorms during hurricane season we can get tropical development out of those thunderstorms. It doesn't mean you're going to have land falling hurricane or tropical storm that's pretty rare but think of the moisture the most recent time that we had the El Nino which was a strong El Nino was just 2023 2024 and most people in Southern California will remember Hillary it was a hurricane that was coming up the coast and we knew that it was not going to be a hurricane when it got to California but we knew it was going to cause flooding and boy did it ever right by the time it got to California all of that moisture was getting backed up against the Jacinto mountains drenched the deserts and the effects were just catastrophic with the flooding. You also think back to Otis Otis was in 2023 2024 we had a strong El Nino and this storm it was small and tight so think of a figure skater put their arms in like this and they start rotating really really fast that's what the storm was doing over some very hot water which is what you need for these tropical systems and it blew up from a tropical storm to a category five in a matter of 24 hours and then slammed Acapulco and just left devastation there, too. So, honestly, when you think about El Niño, you go back to those sea surface temperatures. How are they responding? And the warmer that they are determines how strong the El Niño is going to be. So, when we had the last super El Niño back in 2015-2016, the sea surface temperatures in that area I was just talking about got 2.4° C above normal.

[00:02:24]And so, that's what drove a super strong El Niño. What's been interesting about this year, the water was warming up and indications say back in March were that we were likely going to have a either a strong El Niño or maybe even slightly stronger than that, like a super El Niño. But, the recent models showed that the waters are warming up even faster, which is why there were a concern for a super El Niño. The water needs to be about 82° to fuel a tropical system.

[00:02:48]Once we get to those warmer waters, that's when we start to worry. When you think about El Niño, a lot of people think about what does it mean for the annual rainfall? Especially cuz you guys been so dry and now we're going into a heat wave. If it happens this year, it would be later on, closer to the end of the Atlantic hurricane season or the winter months. And you can't bank on it.

[00:03:08]So, 2015-2016, the last super El Niño, and it's kind of what we're looking at right now, downtown LA only got 9.65 inches of rainfall. That was 5 inches shy of the annual rainfall. San Francisco, however, northern California, they got in on the action. They got 27 inches of rainfall.

[00:03:26]So, they were above about 5 inches. Most recent 2023, I'll give this one to you.

[00:03:31]Downtown LA, it was a strong El Niño, not a super El Niño, and they got 25.19 inches of rain. That was a surplus of 10 inches. So, it's kind of hit or miss.

[00:03:40]You're going to hear a lot of talk about, oh, El Niño is going to bring us out of our deficits and it's going to save us. Hopefully, it will, but I wouldn't bank on it and I would wait till later on in the season and into the winter months.