A Meteolinguocultural Tradition

Several publications internationally engage in the modern linguocultural tradition of declaring the word(s) of the year. Dictionaries typically lead the charge, identifying what neologism generated the most buzz and then waxing poetic about how and why that phrase came to be when they make their year-end proclamations. Oxford University Press and Merriam-Webster concluded that rage bait and slop, respectively, were the trendy terms that ruled the day in 2025. You won’t find me disputing those winners. I do quite like that Merriam-Webster’s 2007 selection, w00t, succinctly codifies the state of online culture that year.

In any given year, a viral reel on your favorite short-form video content provider or some eccentric subculture will probably have a higher chance of originating the word of the year than the sciences. That said, atmospheric science, both in its short-term meteorology and longer-term climatology modes, has a penchant for submitting what would effectively be a nominee for word or phrase of the year stateside. Perhaps it’s because weather is ever omnipresent and always doing something to all of our psyches wittingly or unwittingly, unless you happen to live in a bunker. That gives meteorology an avenue to pass along otherwise esoteric terminology to the general public in a nearly sui generis manner (and a receptive one, I might add — a YouGov poll in May 2026 found The Weather Channel to be the most trusted news source out of those tested among US adults for the fifth year in a row by a wide margin. A +50 favorability rating in this day and age for anything, especially media, is impressive). Mix the ability for the weather to cause plenty of doom and gloom, and you have a decent recipe for wedging the atmospheric sciences into the day’s trending discourse.

You might have seen a few of these terms tossed around in the recent decades, typically making their big splash in the Zeitgeist when a prototypical manifestation of the term materializes. Atmospheric river for those on the West Coast, bombogenesis (or bomb cyclone) for those in the Northeast, polar vortex for the lower 48. At a more local level, terms tend to get plenty of mileage following major disasters, like derecho or microburst for severe wind events. In some cases, like atmospheric river, these terms are also freshly trending topics in research spaces mirroring the public intrigue. Some other terms (like pneumonia front) are fanciful phrases from a bygone era that resurface and capture the public’s imagination. A few terms, like superstorm, are terms that many researchers and operational meteorologists alike would rather not have bouncing around in common vernacular.

What’s Hot for 2026

I’ve noticed a few trending meteorological phrases this year. Heat dome has been a popular one this summer, so much so that The Washington Post has been obsessed with using the same type of heat dome visualization whenever it gets the chance (I have some consternation about the Post equating those plots with the height and strength of “heat domes”, but I’ve settled on it being a useful fiction).

However, the leading candidate for the trending meteorology term of 2026 is almost certainly super El Niño. El Niño on its own has routinely made the rounds whenever an El Niño event has been on tap, but the addition of “super” by various outlets in anticipation of this year’s event has elevated interest to a new level. Publications are hopping onboard the super El Niño train left and right, like CNN, Time, Associated Press, BBC, and Reuters (all this from just a cursory search). Dramatic sciencey headlines hit like crack for editorial boards, and now we even get to call it “super”? Super! (And, in case you are wondering, yes, an outlet has already managed to put “super El Nino” and “slams” in the same headline.)

What Happens in the Pacific Doesn’t Stay in the Pacific

To lead with a disclaimer, super El Niño is not standard parlance in scientific circles. There are various ways to quantify the strength of an El Niño event, commonly through the temperature of a portion of the equatorial Pacific. The Climate Prediction Center (CPC) compares the three-month running thermal anomaly of the equatorial Pacific sea surface relative to the thermal anomalies of the global tropical seas overall to assess the magnitude of El Niño. If the Pacific is more abnormally hot compared to the tropical seas overall, then the El Niño is said to be stronger. In the CPC’s classification system, a difference of at least +2℃ is considered “Very Strong” El Niño, the highest tier possible. It’s not nearly as flashy as “super”, but perhaps it has the same effect.

There are a lot of articles out and about discussing what El Niño is. In short, the equatorial central and eastern Pacific periodically transitions between having cooler waters and warmer waters compared to average, cycling between the two states every few years. The atmosphere plays a significant role in shaping this variation, though it’s a chicken-and-egg situation when it comes to how the ocean and atmosphere shape the oscillation. “El Niño” is sometimes used to describe this phenomenon as a whole, but is now also used to specifically refer to the warm part of the oscillation (with its complement, La Niña, referring to the cooler phases).

The Pacific takes up such a massive portion of the Earth’s surface that any large-scale changes in its thermal character involves the movement of a massive amount of potential energy. Year-to-year, El Niño is the largest influence on global climate, and stands out noticeably despite the chaos of the Earth’s atmosphere. The change in sea surface temperatures of even just a few degrees is enough to redirect where oceanic thunderstorms tend to form, which in turn causes the seasonal atmospheric circulation over the Pacific to shift, resulting in downstream effects in weather patterns globally.

El Niño is another one of those topics that science communicators often have difficulty messaging because it’s not a singular thing that comports to the usual timescales of human planning. El Niño will not hit your house. It is not wafting around in the air. It is not the reason thunderstorms delayed a football game. (Marine ecosystems in the equatorial Pacific are probably one of the few situations where El Niño has a specific, 1:1 impact.)

It’s more realistic to treat El Niño and La Niña like seasons. When El Niño is in place, certain types of weather patterns are more likely, which results in the odds tending to favor more or less rain, or warmer or cooler temperatures, over the course of the “season” depending on your location. Like most things in atmospheric science, its impacts on the weather an individual experiences are far more probabilistic than deterministic.

Is it Happening?

Most likely. Temperatures in the equatorial Pacific continue to warm and are expected to reach their peak anomaly this upcoming winter, which is when El Niño events tend to peak in strength. Latest probabilistic estimates from the CPC put the chance of a very strong El Niño this winter at over 95%, which is about as close to a sure thing as it gets in seasonal forecasting. The amount of anomalous oceanic heat just below the surface is among the most observed on record, and the Relative Oceanic Niño Index, which the CPC uses to quantify El Niño events, was higher during the June-July-August 2026 trimonthly period than any other equivalent summer period since 1950 with the exception of 1997, which led into hugely consequential El Niño with significant global ramifications during 1997-98. Forecasts and statistical models also suggest that the probability that this forthcoming event could be the strongest in modern history isn’t off the table.

There is no guarantee that El Niño will specifically result in the conditions correlated with El Niño, but its stronger intensity makes them more likely (but not necessarily more pronounced). We are already seeing the regional influences of El Niño even though it is just getting started. Meteorological agencies and research institutions earlier this year confidently predicted that hurricane season would be active in the Pacific and inactive in the Atlantic for good reason: the warmer waters of the Pacific would concentrate storms there, effectively acting as a giant fan that would prevent storms from getting organized in the Atlantic. The Pacific so far this year is on track to be one of its most active, with three Category 5s and multiple threats to Hawaii, while the Atlantic has managed to nearly get to the end of September without a hurricane for the first time in the satellite era of weather observation (1970s onwards).

Most of the influences of El Niño on seasonal weather conditions are realized in the winter and following spring. A succinct summary is available here. It is difficult to predict specific significant weather events based on the state of El Niño alone. However, in broad brushes, El Niño events are correlated with wetter conditions across the southern tier of the US and the Pacific coast of the contiguous US during the cool months. Winter temperatures tend to skew wetter over the northern half of the western/central US, though the temperature correlation isn’t as strong as the precipitation one. A strong, “super” El Niño like the kind predicted makes these tendencies more likely.