El Niño Set to Form by August With Rising Heat and Crop Risks

A planet-heating El Niño is favored to emerge by August, with rising odds of an unusually powerful event that threatens record-breaking temperatures during the Northern Hemisphere’s summer.

In an outlook Thursday, the US Climate Prediction Center said there’s a 25% chance for the El Niño to become “very strong” — based on warming in a key stretch of the tropical Pacific — by February 2027. Even mild El Niño events can disrupt crops in Vietnam, Brazil and parts of Africa, while raising wildfire risks in Australia and suppressing hurricane activity in the Atlantic.

The possibility of a strong event with sharper impacts on global weather patterns hinges on the development of wind anomalies across the equatorial Pacific in the coming months, forecasters said. Changes in those winds can lead to greater heating in the belt that produces El Niño and its cooling counterpart, La Niña. Forecasts made in spring, however, tend to be less reliable.

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The La Niña pattern that drove repeated outbreaks of Arctic air during the Northern Hemisphere’s winter has ended, the center said.

Photo: Workers harvest oranges at a citrus farm in Aguai, Sao Paulo state, Brazil, in August 2025. (Dado Galdieri/Bloomberg)