As Earth Warms, Super El Niños Won’t Be So Super, Study Says

El Niño has officially arrived, and it’s going to be a big one. Meteorologists warn that the 2026-2027 “super” El Niño will have major implications for extreme weather, potentially exacerbating heatwaves, droughts, floods, and wildfires in various parts of the world.

Nowadays, El Niño events are unfolding against the backdrop of global warming, and the relationship between these two climatic forces is complex. El Niño exacerbates extreme weather events that are already growing more frequent and severe due to human-driven climate change, and stronger El Niño events tend to have a more significant weather impact. Scientists also expect super El Niños to occur more frequently in a warmer world. However, new research suggests that once global warming exceeds 3.6 degrees Fahrenheit (2 degrees Celsius), super El Niños could pack less of a punch in North America.

The findings, published Friday in the journal Geophysical Research Levels, show that the weather impacts of super El Niños weaken and shift eastward under worst-case global warming scenarios. As a result, extreme El Niño-related impacts over North America—such as winter warming in the Northeast and increased rainfall over California and Florida—are substantially reduced.

“Beyond [6.3 degrees F] 3.5 degrees C of global warming, the distinction between moderate and extreme El Niño impacts over North America nearly disappears,” the authors write.

To investigate how super El Niño impacts will change as Earth warms, a team of researchers analyzed 13 state-of-the-art climate models that can simulate extreme El Niños and their distinctive weather impacts. They ran each model under various emissions scenarios, then compared super El Niño impacts at warming levels ranging from roughly 3.6 degrees F to more than 6.3 degrees F (2 degrees C to more than 3.5 degrees C) with historical simulations.

Even the most intense El Niño events packed less of a punch in a significantly warmer climate. The characteristic North American impacts of a super El Niño event changed significantly, shifting 20 to 30 degrees east and weakening by roughly one-third under a +6.3-degree F (3.5-degree C) warming scenario. This suggests that winter in the Northeast wouldn’t be as warm as it tends to be during extreme El Niños today, and rainfall wouldn’t be as intense in states like California and Florida.

To be clear, this doesn’t mean we won’t have to worry about super El Niños in a world that has warmed more than 3.6 degrees F (2 degrees C) above pre-industrial levels. The study suggests that their weather impacts may become less d