Super El Niño Could Keep UK Winter Wet and Stormy Through Spring — SkimNews
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- El Niño gathering in the Pacific, already one of the largest on record and still intensifying, could upend UK winter forecasts by bringing continuously wet and stormy conditions until spring rather than the typical colder, drier late-winter pattern.
- Adam Scaife at the Met Office says very strong El Niños may reverse the usual late-winter trend of cold easterly winds, instead producing prevailing westerlies that bring milder but still cold weather — "still cold, but it's not extreme."
- Scaife first documented the super-El Niño effect in a 2006 research paper co-written with Thomas Toniazzo, now at NORCE Research in Norway, assessing how the strongest events reshape North Atlantic weather patterns.
- The 1997-1998 super El Niño produced high pressure west of the UK and westerly winds that drove milder, wetter, stormier air across the country; the 2015-2016 event then delivered one of the UK's mildest and wettest winters on record.
- The World Meteorological Organisation warned the El Niño will peak in November but persist until at least February 2027, with stronger events typically driving severe drought in Australia, the Amazon and Indonesia alongside heavy rain in South America, East Africa and the southern US.
- A prolonged wet and stormy UK winter could saturate soils and increase susceptibility to severe flooding, but would also offer an opportunity to replenish reservoirs and groundwater after an exceptionally dry summer.
Why it matters: If this year's El Niño tracks like 2015-2016, UK water authorities face a double-edged outcome: soils saturated enough to raise flood risk through spring, yet reservoirs and groundwater recharged after an exceptionally dry summer — a trade-off the Met Office flagged directly. With the WMO projecting impacts persisting into February 2027, the flood-vs-recharge balance is a near-term planning question for UK infrastructure, not just a meteorological curiosity.
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