AYESHA RASCOE, HOST:
There's yin and yang, night and day and when it comes to global weather, the cyclical weather patterns of La Nina and El Nino. A new federal forecast says El Nino is likely to arrive this summer. It makes the Earth hotter. Rebecca Hersher from NPR's climate desk is here to talk about this forecast. Hi, Rebecca.
REBECCA HERSHER, BYLINE: Hi.
RASCOE: So El Nino is coming. Do we have an expected date?
HERSHER: Oh, I wish we did. We don't have, like, an exact date, but it will probably be sometime between June and August. I called up Emily Becker about this. She's a researcher at the University of Miami who helps put together the federal forecast.
EMILY BECKER: Looks like about a 62% chance that El Nino will develop over the summer.
HERSHER: And then it will probably persist, like, into next year.
RASCOE: Now, what will that mean for people here in the U.S.?
HERSHER: Well, El Nino has lots of different weather effects all across the country and around the world. There are a couple that are really notable that we usually see here in the U.S. One is more rain in some parts of the country. And here's how Emily Becker explains that phenomenon.
BECKER: El Nino tends to shift the jet stream in such a way that it steers storms and precipitation across the southern tier of the U.S. in the winter.
HERSHER: So that can be good news for areas like the Southwest that are dealing with really serious drought. More rain can obviously help refill reservoirs. It can also erase the conditions that lead to really bad wildfires. Although the drought in the Southwest right now, it's so bad that one year of wetter weather would not be enough to fix it. That's according to a new analysis by the National Integrated Drought Information System.
RASCOE: OK. So some good news for the southwest, potentially. But what about other parts of the country?
HERSHER: Well, there's also potentially good news for the East and Gulf coasts because El Nino makes it a little bit harder for hurricanes to form in the Atlantic. Basically, the wind conditions that happen in that part of the ocean are generally not as conducive to hurricanes when El Nino is there, but it only takes one big hurricane making landfall where people live to cause massive damage. And climate change has caused temperatures in the Atlantic to soar, which means there's more fuel for storms that do form, and none of that is anything that El Nino can fix. Plus, El Nino does nothing to temper storms that form in the Pacific Ocean. So it, again, is kind of limited good news.
RASCOE: Well, what about outside the U.S.? Like, what does El Nino do globally?
HERSHER: Globally, the big thing that it does is drive up average temperatures, and this goes back to what El Nino is. So it happens when trade winds over the ocean get weaker, and that lets huge amounts of warm water move within the Pacific. So the Eastern Pacific gets warmer. There's extra heat, and that extra heat, it drives up average global temperatures ever so slightly. Now, human-caused climate change, like from burning oil and gas and coal is driving up global temperatures a lot. And that means every single year, there's a chance that global temperatures will set a new record. So the extra heat from El Nino is often like that little bump that a year needs to cross over into record-breaking territory.
RASCOE: So years with an active El Nino, they often break the record for the hottest year?
HERSHER: Yeah, exactly. And actually, the last few years are a really good example of this. So last year, 2025, there was no El Nino, and it was one of the three hottest years on record. But last time there was an active El Nino in 2023 and 2024, both of those years broke records. So 2023 was by far the hottest year ever recorded on Earth. There were deadly heat waves that killed people all over the world. And then the very next year, it happened again with El Nino still in effect. So we have some warning about these looming El Nino conditions that are shaping up for this summer, so it's time to prepare for that extra heat.
RASCOE: That's Rebecca Hersher from NPR's climate desk. Thank you so much.
HERSHER: Thanks. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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