BoM Warns Current El Niño Could Be Strongest on Record
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- Bureau of Meteorology said the El Niño in the Pacific could peak with sea-surface temperature anomalies between +2.2C and above +3C in the Niño 3.4 region — compared to the +2.6C monthly record from January 1983 — and flagged a realistic chance this event ranks as the strongest on record.
- Zeke Hausfather, a climate scientist at Berkeley Earth, reviewed 14 seasonal model forecasts and wrote that this El Niño may end up the strongest 'by a truly mind-blowing margin,' with models forecasting conditions 'outside the envelope of anything we have ever observed.'
- The bureau's own model projects a peak of about +3.3C in Niño 3.4, with the phenomenon expected to remain in place until at least the coming southern summer.
- Bureau climatologist Zhi-Weng Chua said the projected anomaly 'is remarkable, and it shows just how much heat there is in the ocean,' linking the scale of the event to decades of ocean heat accumulation from climate change.
- The August–October long-range forecast gives Brisbane, Sydney, Melbourne, Hobart, Adelaide and Perth at least an 80% chance of maximum temperatures in the top 20% on record, with all six cities also facing an increased chance of unusually low rainfall.
- University of Melbourne seasonal-predictions expert Kim Reid warned she is watching for a possible positive Indian Ocean Dipole cooling in waters off Australia's north-west — a combination that previously contributed to the 'tinderbox drought' before the 2019–2020 black summer bushfires.
- Multiple bureau and university scientists, including Sarah Perkins-Kirkpatrick of ANU, stressed that El Niño's strength does not strongly correlate with its impacts in Australia — a caveat the bureau explicitly emphasized even as it flagged the record-breaking potential.
Why it matters: If models are right that this El Niño peaks above +3C in the Niño 3.4 region, it would release an extraordinary amount of ocean heat into the atmosphere — the kind of scale 14 reviewed forecasts call unmatched in the observational record — putting the world on track for record global temperatures while six of Australia's largest cities face >80% odds of top-20% heat extremes and elevated bushfire-risk drought conditions if a positive Indian Ocean Dipole also develops.
