“The really big ones reverberate all over the planet with extreme droughts, floods, heatwaves, and storms. “Even so, nature has a way of tripping us up just when we think we know it all,” he said. He said big El Niños tended to come along every 10 to 15 years and so it would be “very unusual” to see one so soon on the heels of the last major one in 2015 and 16. However, the magnitude of the predicted El Niños shows a very large spread, everything from blockbuster to wimp,” he said. Several of the forecasts suggest temperatures could get this high by October, but scientists again urged caution with the results.ĭr Mike McPhaden, a senior research scientist at the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, said historically El Niños tended to come along every four years or so. Sign up for Guardian Australia’s free morning and afternoon email newsletters for your daily news roundup Extreme El Niños feature temperatures in that region of 2C above average. There was a 50% chance of an El Niño developing before the end of the year, the bureau said.Ī feature of El Niños is a rise in sea surface temperatures at least 0.8C above the long term average in a region of the central equatorial Pacific. Australia’s Bureau of Meteorology said in a Tuesday update that all seven models it had surveyed – including those from weather agencies in the UK, Japan and the US – showed sea surface temperatures passing the El Niño threshold by August.īut the bureau and climate scientists warned that forecasts were much less reliable during the southern hemisphere autumn and outlooks should be “viewed with some caution”.

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