Signs increasingly point to an El Niño weather pattern starting this summer. And it might be a strong one.
That could have a big influence on how hot Utah’s weather gets this year.
“El Niño does tend to boost the global temperature,” said Emily Becker, deputy director of the University of Miami Cooperative Institute for Marine and Atmospheric Studies. “Out of the last several decades, the warmest year of each decade has been an El Niño year.”
The most recent El Niño happened in 2023 and 2024 — the planet’s two warmest years in modern times and ones that set scorching new records across Utah.
Global temperatures have steadily climbed toward the top of the thermometer in recent decades, which most scientists agree is the result of climate change driven by fossil fuel emissions. Adding an El Niño layer on top of that could push temperatures even higher in 2026 and 2027.
“It's pretty likely that the next couple of years will be in the top three” warmest years on record for global temperatures, Becker said.
El Niño and its counterpart La Niña are the warm and cool phases of a cycle known as the El Niño-Southern Oscillation. It’s a pattern of rising and falling temperatures in a tropical part of the Pacific Ocean that can influence weather across the globe.
The latest forecast from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration says there’s around an 80% chance El Niño develops by this summer and a more than 90% chance it arrives by the fall. It also says there’s around a one-in-four chance this El Niño will be a very strong one.
“This is a somewhat unusually confident forecast for a stronger El Niño,” Becker said. “We've seen a few months in a row of those forecasts continuing to call for the development of El Niño and also we've seen some signs developing in the Pacific Ocean that give us a little bit more confidence.”
That matters for places like Utah, because inland regions have seen temperatures rise even more than coastal areas, said John Horel, professor of atmospheric science at the University of Utah.
“We're already experiencing increasing temperatures throughout Utah over the past several years,” Horel said. “Adding in El Niño will potentially increase those temperatures.”
That means Utahns could experience hotter midday highs, which can quickly lead to health hazards. Extreme heat kills more Americans each year than all other extreme weather events combined.
Warmer temperatures in the morning and evening could also strain the power grid.
“Particularly in areas that are really dependent on air conditioning,” Horel said, “it's the extension into the evening hours that can make it much more likely that the electrical loads are going to be high around the Western U.S.”
It’s important to note that a very strong El Niño wouldn’t necessarily mean that the impacts would be more extreme, Becker said. It just means that there’s an even higher likelihood they could happen. The El Niño-La Nina cycle also isn’t the only atmospheric pattern at play, so there are a number of other factors that can determine what Utah may see, and there are inherent challenges with forecasting weather months in advance.
Because climate change has shifted Earth’s temperatures upwards in recent decades, Becker’s team has switched to relying on an El Niño measurement system that compares current temperatures in the tropical Pacific to conditions in the rest of the ocean, rather than historic baselines. Comparing 2026’s ocean temperatures to the seas of 30 years ago might make the upcoming El Niño seem off-the-charts.
“So, this new index takes into account those warmer tropical oceans and also has a more accurate representation of the impacts that we can expect,” Becker said.
Even if an El Niño begins this summer, Horel said the more critical indicator will be what it looks like months from now. Because El Niño usually peaks in the winter, he said the biggest temperature impacts may not show up until next year.
“The intensity of the event for this summer may not be as big of a factor as if it continues through the winter and then next summer.”
Editor’s note: KUER is a licensee of the University of Utah but operates as an editorially independent news organization.
