I’ve tracked El Niño for years. I’ve never seen this before

You've probably seen the headlines. A super El Nino is brewing in the Pacific. I've been tracking El Nino for years, but these numbers, they're off the charts. So what is it that I've never seen before? I've never seen an El Nino this strong, hit on top of an ocean, that is hotter than we've ever seen it. And that has experts around the world worried that the usual El Nino floods and storms will be worse than we can imagine. So how does this all work? At its most basic, El Nino is a huge shift of warm ocean water. So normally, strong trade winds blowing near the equator shove the warm surface water east to west toward Asia and Australia. All that warm water gets piled up, pushing heat deep into the sea, while opening the door for cooler water to come to the surface off the coast of South America. This is our normal ocean state. But during an El Nino, those trade winds collapse, often triggered by a disturbance like a cyclone that sets off a domino effect. And with no wind holding it back, that giant pool of warm water sloshes right back across the Pacific, spreading out like a hot blanket. So why does this slosh in the Pacific matter to the rest of the world? Because the Pacific covers half the planet. That much warm water sitting on the surface releases a colossal amount of heat straight up into the atmosphere. That injection of heat fuels thunderstorm clusters and rising columns of air, acting like giant roadblocks to the highways that direct the flow of weather systems around the world, aka the jet stream. It dumps torrential rains and flooding onto places that don't normally see it, while trapping other regions in devastating droughts. And for countries sitting on the receiving end of that warm water slosh, like Peru, the impacts are immediate. So the coastal communities are preparing for flooding and even landslides, especially in communities and areas that don't have the correct infrastructure in place. The northern part of the Andes are also expecting really heavy rains and how to contain that, while southern parts typically face really intense droughts and they need to be adapted so this don't disrupt the food system. As for climate change, right now we're stacking one of the hottest El Nino's ever recorded on top of more heat. El Nino itself doesn't create new heat, it redistributes energy already stored in the ocean. Climate change, on the other hand, is adding more trapped heat back into this equation every day. El Nino just kind of moves the heat around and that's bad because people are adapted to the amount of rainfall they get, the temperatures they get, and when they move it around then all of a sudden, hey, I'm not getting the rainfall I was expecting to get and that creates big problems for people. So does all of this mean that the Super El Nino is a window into a warming world where we could see these impacts every day? It's not a permanent shift yet. The extreme nature of this El Nino means the ocean will likely seesaw back into a colder La Nino over the next two years, but what's happening now is the clearest preview we've ever had of what happens when a supercharged natural cycle collides with an ever-warming baseline.