By admin 
With Hurricane Isaias in the rearview mirror, the Atlantic appears set to resume the status its held all hurricane season — quiet.
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But the weather pattern scientists say is mostly responsible for this calmer than normal season — El Niño — is set to stick around for many more months after hurricane season wraps on Nov. 30. Experts say this year’s record-smashing version of the phenomenon, dubbed a “super” El Niño, could deliver a wetter, warmer and more tornado-prone winter to Florida.
And, some experts say, climate change could be playing a role in just how “super” this El Niño turns out to be.
“The super El Niño is occurring in an ocean and atmosphere system that is fundamentally different due to climate change,” said Marc Alessi, a climate scientist with the Union of Concerned Scientists. “We’re starting to see the effects of that more and more in everything that occurs.”
There are many factors that play into whether a hurricane season is busy or chill, but El Niño and La Niña are perhaps the best known players. They’re both sides of a pendulum swing in a natural weather pattern that’s happened for thousands of years. La Niña usually brings a boom year for storms in the Atlantic, and El Niño often brings a bust.
When an El Niño is happening, sea surface temperatures in a certain patch of the Pacific heat up higher than normal. In the case of this year, they’re already breaking records, even though an El Niño usually doesn’t peak until December or later.
That hotter than usual water shifts thunderstorm activity into the Central Pacific, said Allison Wing, an associate professor in the department of earth, ocean and atmospheric science at Florida State University.
While the Central Pacific is full of thunderstorms, she said, wind shear, or turbulent winds right around the height airplanes fly, takes over in the Atlantic, destabilizing would-be storms and make it harder for them to form. The intense wind shear blanketing most of the Atlantic basin this summer kept a lid on storm development for most of the season.
But, she noted, a quiet season in the Atlantic usually means a busy season in the Pacific. Hawaii has been slammed with three powerful hurricanes this year, and the Southern California coast was under a tropical storm watch this month — the second ever recorded for the region.
And there’s still six more weeks of hurricane season to go. If a storm manages to find a narrow path around all that shear in the Atlantic, it could be a doozy, Wing said.
“I wouldn’t count it out yet,” she said.
A wet winter for South Florida
November marks the end of hurricane season and the beginning of South Florida’s dry season, which stretches through April. But El Niño could keep South Florida soggy this winter, said Emily Powell, Florida’s state climatologist.
“Based on previously very strong El Niño events, we see roughly twice as much precipitation in winter compared to La Niña years,” she said. “That’s around 40% more precipitation compared to all years.”
Powell said it’s unclear from the records exactly when all that rain could arrive, but she predicts patches of drier weather broken up by very heavy rainstorms, which could lead to inundated streets in South Florida.
“I think this year we can expect to see above average precipitation to kick in November/December and stick around,” she said.
Unfortunately for South Floridians, Powell is pretty bearish on the other traditional side effect of an El Niño winter in South Florida — cooler weather. When it comes to temperatures, she said it’s likely to be a pretty normal winter for South Florida. So, warm.
Looking back is only so helpful, because climate change has upped the average temperatures we measure against.
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“Our baseline is already warmer. So we can say with high confidence that it will be warmer than those 20th-century El Niños because we’re warmer than we used to be,” she said.
But perhaps the biggest weather worry for this season’s extra-strong El Niño is the rising risk of tornado outbreaks. During the winter, instability in the atmosphere can create an easier setup for severe weather, including tornadoes.
“Northern Florida always has risk for severe weather in winter, but El Niño shifts that south,” Powell said. “We cannot say exactly how many tornadoes we might see or when they’ll occur or where.”
During one of the strongest El Niño years on record for Florida — winter of 1978-79 — a string of tornadoes tore across Central Florida in late February, and destroying 800 homes. It was the deadliest tornado outbreak in Florida history.
Tornadoes, particularly strong or deadly ones, are a rare sight in Central and South Florida outside of an encroaching hurricane. Yet research from the Melbourne office of the National Weather Service has found a link between strong El Niños and more severe tornado outbreaks in Florida.
The climate impact
This year’s El Niño came on fast and strong. Some scientists see the fingerprints of climate change on what’s been dubbed a “super” or “super duper” El Niño.
Marc Alessi, a climate scientist with the Union of Concerned Scientists, said there have been a handful of studies trying to tackle the question of how a warmer world affects these weather patterns that have been in play for centuries.
One study, published in the Journal of Climate in 2023, found that since 1960, El Niño and La Niña have gotten more extreme. Researchers ran simulations of the world’s weather and found that the pattern repeated in about 75% of the models with climate change.
A new study, published in the journal Science, examined coral skeletons from the last thousand years and tracked evidence of La Niña and El Niño, which suggests the weather pattern is growing more extreme in the current, hotter environment.
The timing doesn’t appear to have shifted, Alessi said, so there’s still a swing back and forth from one end of the spectrum to the other. But the peaks have gotten higher and the valleys have gotten lower, he said.
“We live in a completely different climate system due to fossil-fuel-driven climate change. This is a signal of what we’re going to see more of in the future,” he said.
In fact, the constant warming seen in the world’s oceans due to climate change prompted scientists to come up with a new way to measure the strength of an El Niño or La Niña.
Under the old metric, known as the Oceanic Niño Index, this El Niño tops the charts for severity. Under the new metric, known as the Relative Oceanic Niño Index, it’s still record-breaking for the month, but it only ranks third overall.
But, Alessi noted, there are still several more months left for this year’s El Niño to run up its numbers and climb the charts.
This story was originally published October 13, 2026 at 10:39 AM with the headline “‘Super’ El Niño is breaking records. Here’s what it could mean for winter in Florida.”
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