TIME TO PLACE A PIN OR TWO?

Going into Freedom Weekend, we saw "El Niño is 'strengthening rapidly,' forecasters warn. Here's what it could mean for your weather."  The Narrative is in the secondary headline.  "Think more Pacific hurricanes, a wetter and colder winter across the southern U.S. — and potentially the hottest year on record."

Scroll down, though, and note the uncertainties.

The 2015-2016 "super El Niño," for example, didn't deliver a wetter-than-average winter in Southern California — one of its typical trademarks. At the same time, climate change has made what we know about previous El Niños less helpful for informing what could come next, because the ocean is already significantly warmer today than it was back then.

But some effects are relatively predictable.

In early May, NOAA said it was "very likely" 2026 will be one of the five hottest years on record. That's without accounting for El Niño's warming impact. A "super El Niño" could make 2026 or 2027 the hottest year on record, displacing 2024.

Stronger El Niños also tend to flip the usual hurricane season equation, suppressing storms in the Caribbean and tropical Atlantic while amplifying them in the central and eastern Pacific. More tropical threats to Hawaii and the Southwest U.S. are a possibility.

Extremes of wetness and dryness — and heat and cold — are possible as well. Winter tends to get warmer in the northern half of North America and cooler and wetter in the southern half, especially in the Southeast and along the Gulf Coast. Elsewhere, drought could afflict the Caribbean, while India and Southeast Asia might see fewer summer monsoons.

Complex adaptive systems, doing what they do.  "There is still enough uncertainty that seeing a weaker outcome would not be a surprise."

The National Hurricane Center's Atlantic hurricane forecast is out and it relies on that stronger El Niño.  "NOAA predicts below-normal 2026 Atlantic hurricane season."  There was already at least one named Atlantic tropical storm this season.  That heat wave east of the Mississippi during Freedom Weekend?  We used to call that the lazy, hazy, crazy days of summer.  Nat "King" Cole in 1963, that song performs a lot older!