El Niño: The Last Video You Need to Watch About It | Critical Latitude

The Gist

NOAA predicts the 2026 El Niño will be the strongest in recorded history since 1950, driven by unprecedented eastern Pacific warming and a shift in measurement methodology. This warming event alters global jet streams, increases southern U.S. precipitation, and supercharges global temperature records.

Quick Overview

NOAA's Climate Prediction Center forecasts an 83% chance that the developing 2026 El Niño will exceed all prior records since 1950, driven by sea surface temperature anomalies reaching 6 to 7 degrees Celsius above normal west of the Galápagos. The video breaks down the physics of the El Niño-Southern Oscillation, historical coral and paper records dating back centuries, and the complex interplay between ocean currents, atmospheric trade winds, and global climate change models.

Key Points: Galápagos penguins survive at the equator because a 100-meter-deep cold current flows east and upwells nutrient-rich water, though strong El Niño events cut their population by up to two-thirds. Peruvian sailors originally named the recurring warm coastal current El Niño de Navidad around Christmas, which scientists later generalized to cover basin-wide ocean warming. British mathematician Gilbert Walker discovered the Southern Oscillation in the early 1920s by finding a seesaw in air pressure between Darwin, Australia and Tahiti, though he died without connecting it to oceanic temperatures. Norwegian meteorologist Jacob Bjerknes published a 1969 paper uniting Walker's atmospheric seesaw with equatorial Pacific sea surface temperatures to form the complete Walker Circulation model. Coral core samples recovered from Christmas Island and Fanning Island reveal that El Niño oscillations have been occurring for at least 125,000 years, with variability increasing 25 percent over the last five decades. The 1982-83 El Niño caught scientists entirely by surprise because an eruption from El Chichón in Mexico threw sulfur into the atmosphere, causing satellites to read ocean temperatures several degrees too cold. Following the surprise of 1982, an international program deployed a network of TAO buoys anchored by railroad wheels across the equatorial Pacific, which successfully tracked the massive 1997-98 El Niño. NOAA altered its measurement index in February 2026 by subtracting background tropical warmth from the main Niño 3.4 region, resulting in a reading of plus 2.4 degrees Celsius above normal for October.