PARIS, France — A leading European climate monitoring body has issued an updated forecast showing growing consensus among global climate experts that a powerful El Niño event is on track to develop in the second half of 2024. Europe’s Copernicus Climate Change Service announced Wednesday that latest model projections have consistently trended upward over the past month, raising the likelihood of an extreme warming event.
Carlo Buontempo, director of Copernicus, told Agence France-Presse that between May 1 and June 1, every leading climate model used in the monthly forecast revised its predictions to reflect greater warming potential. “The odds are strongly in favour of a moderate to strong, or probably strong to record-breaking, event at this stage,” Buontempo said.
El Niño is a naturally occurring climate pattern marked by anomalous warming of surface ocean waters across the central and eastern equatorial Pacific. Beyond the Pacific basin, the phenomenon drives far-reaching shifts in global atmospheric circulation, altering wind patterns, barometric pressure systems and precipitation distributions across every continent.
In its updated outlook, Copernicus reported that three out of every four contributing forecasters project that Pacific sea surface temperatures in key El Niño monitoring regions could climb to 2.5 degrees Celsius or more above long-term seasonal averages by November. Notably, only three El Niño events in recorded modern history have crossed the 2-degree warming threshold: the events of 1877/78, 1982/83, 1997/98 and 2015/16, none have surpassed 2.5C, meaning a 2024 event of that magnitude would rank among the most intense recorded since systematic observations began in the late 19th century.