El Nino typically results in drier conditions across Southeast Asia, Australia, southern Africa, and northern Brazil, and wetter conditions in the Horn of Africa, the southern United States, Peru and Ecuador.
This year’s anomalous warmth will have particularly strong effects throughout the Tropics, Scaife said.
Forecasters “expect really severe droughts in places like South America, and the West Pacific”, he added.
El Nino is already causing well below normal rainfall in India, the Met Office said.
The weather event is also expected to prompt “increased rainfall and storminess in the autumn here in the UK around November time”, Scaife said.
“These are not short-term weather forecasts. We’re talking about really long-term, persistent conditions here,” he stressed.
2027 LIKELY “HOTTEST EVER”
Since El Nino events drive up the global average temperature, 2027 is now “very likely to replace 2024 as the warmest year on record”, said Nick Dunstone, another Met Office scientist.
In 2024, global temperatures exceeded 1.5°C above the preindustrial period, the limit set by international commitments to curb global warming.
Last year was the third hottest on record.
The British forecast for a very strong El Nino was in line with other forecasts: Carlo Buontempo, director of the European Union’s Copernicus Climate Change Service, told AFP in January that 2026 could be “another record-breaking year”.
Peruvian and Ecuadorian fishermen coined the term El Nino (“the boy” or “the Christ Child”) in the 19th century for the arrival of an unusually warm ocean current off the coast that reduced their catch just before Christmas.
This phase of natural climate oscillation between high and low temperatures occurs every two to seven years, according to meteorologists.
There is an opposite cooling pattern called La Nina, and these have alternated in an irregular cycle that has lasted for thousands of years.
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