GENEVA — The World Meteorological Organization on Thursday said the 2026 El Niño will almost certainly persist into February 2027 and could become the strongest such event on record, as toxic wildfire haze from Indonesia spread across Malaysia, Singapore and the Philippines.
WMO Secretary-General Celeste Saulo told reporters in Geneva that forecasters put the odds of El Niño lasting through February at nearly 100 percent, the strongest level of certainty the UN agency has ever attached to one of its updates. Saulo said the event may be "stronger than anything since our monitoring began" and "literally off the charts we have used for the past four decades."
Sea-surface temperatures in the central and eastern tropical Pacific have run more than 2 degrees Celsius above average in recent weeks, and weekly readings between late July and mid-August ranged from 2.2 to 2.6 degrees. Subsurface temperatures in parts of the Pacific have topped 8 degrees above normal. Forecasters expect monthly surface anomalies to approach 4 degrees at the event's peak, which would put the current El Niño ahead of any recorded since 1950.
What is at risk
The WMO expects drier weather across large parts of Southeast Asia, Central America and northern South America, and wetter conditions over eastern Africa, southern Brazil and the southern United States. Panama on Thursday cut vessel transits through its canal by more than 10 percent to conserve water; the waterway carries about 14,000 ships a year and generates about $3 billion for the government. The United States has deployed the hospital ship USNS Comfort to the Peruvian coast, where past El Niño events have set off flash floods and landslides. China's forecasters expect seven typhoons to make landfall this year, and Typhoon Dolphin forced more than 1 million evacuations in August.
The haze
Wildfires burning across Sumatra and Indonesian Borneo since mid-July have scorched more than 107,000 hectares, Indonesia said, and its Health Ministry counted more than 50,000 respiratory infections tied to the smoke between July and August, including more than 12,000 in children under age 5. Air pollution in some areas has reached more than 15 times the level the World Health Organization recommends.
Indonesian Forestry Minister Raja Juli Antoni told reporters this week the containment fight was entering a critical phase. "September is the peak of El Niño," he said. "September is the main fight for us." Bambang Hero Saharjo, a forest-fire forensics researcher at Institut Pertanian Bogor University, told the BBC that this year's burn could reach 11 million hectares, on par with Indonesia's 1997-98 fire season.
Caveat
Both center and lean-left outlets covering Thursday's briefing framed the WMO outlook in broadly similar terms, and no dissenting forecast or challenge to the agency's measurement methodology appeared in the reporting. The BBC noted that scientists have not confirmed climate change is strengthening El Niño events, and the WMO itself calls El Niño a natural phenomenon separate from human-caused warming, even as the two compound one another.
The WMO said El Niño will peak toward the end of 2026, with knock-on effects on rainfall and temperature likely to run well into 2027.