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.