El Niño is here. It is strengthening. On Thursday, NOAA publishes the update that could formally confirm what the Pacific has been signaling for months. Here is where things stand, clearly, and without the noise.
There is a temptation, when covering a developing El Niño, to either dramatize it or dismiss it. The dramatists reach for words like "monster" and "code red" and "civilization-altering." The dismissers note that most people will never notice a shifted Pacific and get on with their lives. Both camps are wrong in the same way: they are reacting to the story rather than reading it.
The story, right now, is actually quite clear. The Pacific Ocean is warmer than it has been at this stage in over a decade. NOAA has issued an El Niño Advisory. The official seasonal index is on the verge of formally crossing the threshold that defines El Niño in the historical record. Major forecast centers and multi-model ensembles are now in broad agreement about continued El Niño development. And on Thursday, July 9, NOAA's Climate Prediction Center will publish the next Diagnostic Discussion, the monthly update that climate forecasters, commodity traders, agricultural planners, and hurricane forecasters will all read within hours of release.
This is a good moment to step back from the mechanism explainers and the index tables and simply describe where things stand.
The central Pacific has been warming since late 2025. Not dramatically at first, a few tenths of a degree at a time, the kind of change that doesn't make headlines. But by mid-June, the weekly Niño 3.4 index had climbed to +1.7°C above the long-term average by the week centered on June 17, per IRI's Quick Look. That is a moderate-to-strong signal by any historical measure. (NOAA's own June 11 reading showed +0.7°C using the relative index, which adjusts for the unusually warm tropical oceans surrounding the Pacific signal, the difference between the two figures reflects measurement framework, not a data conflict. Both are real; the traditional reading captures the raw warming, the relative reading isolates the El Niño signal itself.)
The eastern Pacific has gone further. The Niño 1+2 region, a narrow band off the coasts of Peru and Ecuador that acts as the leading edge of El Niño warming, was already at +2.1°C in NOAA's June 11 reading. Coastal Peru is experiencing unusually warm winter conditions. Warm eastern Pacific waters are already raising concern for Peru's anchoveta fishery, historically one of the world's most important single-species fisheries and highly sensitive to El Niño disruptions. The ocean is not waiting for forecasters to catch up with it.
Below the surface, the story has been developing since December. A series of downwelling Kelvin waves, subsurface pulses of warm water that travel east along the equator, have been loading heat into the central and eastern Pacific for months. The subsurface heat content, measured as the average temperature anomaly in the upper 300 meters, has been well above normal since winter. This is the fuel that drives El Niño from surface anomaly into sustained, coupled ocean-atmosphere event.
An El Niño is not simply warm ocean water. It is warm ocean water that has pulled the atmosphere into a response, weakened trade winds, suppressed convection over Indonesia, an altered Walker Circulation. Ocean without atmospheric coupling is just a warm patch. With coupling, it becomes a climate driver.
The coupling is underway. NOAA's June 11 Diagnostic Discussion documented low-level westerly wind anomalies across the central equatorial Pacific, upper-level easterly anomalies consistent with an altered circulation pattern, and suppressed rainfall near Indonesia and the Maritime Continent. The Southern Oscillation Index, a pressure-based measure of the atmospheric side of ENSO, has been running negative, consistent with El Niño conditions.
The key question, which NOAA has flagged explicitly, is whether this coupling strengthens and sustains through the summer. The historical record shows that the very strong El Niños, the ones that reshaped weather patterns across multiple continents, were characterized by significant ocean-atmosphere coupling maintained through July, August, and September. That coupling is not yet confirmed for 2026. It is one of the things Thursday's update will address.
"Stronger El Niño events do not ensure strong impacts; they can only make certain impacts more likely."
NOAA Climate Prediction Center, June 11, 2026
The phrase "very strong El Niño" has a specific technical meaning: it refers to a peak Niño 3.4 anomaly that ranks among the largest since reliable measurements began. NOAA's June 11 Diagnostic Discussion explicitly stated a 63% chance of a very strong El Niño during November–January, an assessment that would place this event among the largest in the historical record since 1950. That figure came from the June 11 document; readers who want the most current probability should check CPC's live strength-probability table at publication, as these figures are updated monthly and the tabular product may reflect newer model runs.
Context matters here. The two prior events that reached this level were 1997-98 and 2015-16. Both reshaped precipitation patterns across multiple continents. Both suppressed Atlantic hurricane activity while increasing Eastern Pacific activity. Both brought wetter winters to California and the U.S. southern tier. Both caused significant disruption to agricultural systems in El Niño-sensitive regions, from West African cocoa crops to Southeast Asian palm oil to Indian monsoon rainfall. Neither was a catastrophe in isolation. Both had significant, lasting real-world consequences.
The 63% figure means there is also a 37% chance the event does not reach that threshold, settling into "strong" or perhaps "moderate-to-strong" territory. That would still be a consequential event. ENSO, even at moderate strength, is one of the most powerful drivers of seasonal weather patterns on the planet. The question of peak strength matters for calibrating the magnitude of those impacts, not whether they occur.
The July 9 Diagnostic Discussion should give the first clear CPC read on the April–May–June seasonal picture, including whether the relative Niño 3.4/RONI framework has crossed the +0.5°C threshold that formally defines El Niño in the historical record. Based on the trajectory of the MAM value (–0.1°C) and the subsequent weekly readings, that crossing appears likely, but the seasonal average will be confirmed in Thursday's publication.
More importantly, it will reflect three additional weeks of ocean and atmosphere observations, including the behavior of the Madden-Julian Oscillation, which passed through the western Pacific in early June and is expected to re-emerge there in July. A coherent MJO pulse over the western Pacific generates the westerly wind bursts that launch downwelling Kelvin waves, the same mechanism documented in both 1997-98 and 2015-16. Whether that mechanism is activating again will be visible in the new data.
Watch for three things in Thursday's update: the AMJ RONI value, any change to the 63% very-strong probability, and the language NOAA uses to describe the summer ocean-atmosphere coupling. Those three signals will tell you more about where this event is headed than any model plume currently available.
If you have been following El Niño coverage elsewhere over the past several weeks, you will have encountered a wide range in tone, from sober NOAA bulletins to websites declaring an imminent "code red atmospheric scenario." The gap between those poles is worth naming.
The data is genuinely significant. A 63% probability of a very strong event, issued by NOAA, is not routine, it reflects an unusual degree of model agreement and a meaningful physical signal in the Pacific. Reporting that accurately is not alarmism; it is precision. At the same time, probabilities are not certainties. The 2014 El Niño was forecast to be potentially extreme and instead collapsed, primarily because the right atmospheric forcing did not materialize. The physics require both a loaded ocean and a cooperative atmosphere. Right now the ocean is loaded. The atmosphere is coupling. Whether that coupling holds through summer is the open question.
This site will track the answer week by week, using primary source data from NOAA, the Bureau of Meteorology, and IRI, and checking its numbers against independent fact-checkers before publishing. If Thursday's update changes the picture, we will say so. If it confirms the current trajectory, we will say that instead.
The ocean has made its signal clear. Now we watch whether the atmosphere holds up its end.
For the mechanism behind the numbers, see why RONI still reads –0.1°C while El Niño is already officially here. For the MJO's role in driving this event, see the MJO deep dive. For commodity market impacts already being priced in, see what El Niño does to your grocery bill. Live data on the dashboard.
NOAA CPC ENSO Diagnostic Discussion, June 11, 2026 · IRI ENSO Quick Look, June 2026 · NOAA CPC ENSO strength probabilities · BOM ENSO Wrap-Up, June 16, 2026 · NOAA Coral Reef Watch ENSO Current Conditions, June 2026