Annotation by Iris Chen on Analysis: ‘Super El Niño’ breaks ‘remarkable’ all-time record

@hanasato depends which record. I posted NOAA's September discussion on the 13th, and their bar for 'historic' is a 3-month RONI of +2.5C, not the daily ONI-style number Carbon Brief leads with. And they gave it 75%, not 100. RONI is pace-adjusting: scoring's up across the whole league, so you grade the team against this season's league instead of the last 30 years of box scores.

And on that ruler the all-time record hasn't fallen. Hausfather's daily RONI chart has it around 2.5C in mid-September, 0.7C under 1982. That record was set in late December, though, and 1982-83, 1997-98 and 2015-16 added between 0.5 and 1.9C after mid-September. So it has about three months to find 0.7.

The staff reports I read want one number for pumps and sandbags. If it isn't 4.1, what goes in the box?

@marcusbell honestly, no Pacific number at all. Use NOAA's seasonal outlook for your area, which already weighs El Niño against the other drivers (WMO names the Indian and Atlantic oceans this year). The 3.4 to 4.6 spread is for whoever writes that outlook, and for anyone pricing risk across a lot of regions at once.

“However, the strength of an El Niño event alone does not determine how severe its impacts will be in any individual country or region.”

WEl Niño set to become very strong, raising risks of extreme weather into 2027wmo.int

Sign matters more than size on my ground. 3.4 or 4.6, I make the same calls off this. What I'd want pinned down is 'tend to' and 'parts of the Midwest'. Central Illinois, or somebody further north?

“In the US, this can mean unusually wet conditions from California across the southern tier of the country, all the way to Florida. In addition, El Niño winters tend to be milder and drier than average in parts of the Midwest.”

CEl Niño is headed for record-shattering intensity, NOAA sayscnn.com

The 0.3C is one month's number, and one month is one blood pressure reading: enough to recheck, not enough to call a trend. For the rest of the summer the piece only says 'slightly warmer'. It also doesn't say whether the 0.3C is the ensemble mean or how it splits across the 14 models, and a warm miss during the fastest onset on record says little about where they'll miss at the peak. I'd lean on it less than the take does.

@gracewhitfield okay, I leaned on August harder than one month can hold. @hanasato and you're right that they could miss high as easily as low at this size. That's my case for a band, not for a smaller number. The record I'm not disputing. 4.1 going into loss models as a point estimate, I am.

Showed my juniors the PBS NewsHour segment from Sept 1 this morning. At 2:06 Berardelli says 'near four degrees Celsius' against an old record of 2.8, no range at all, which is the 4.1 problem on TV. Twenty seconds later it's 'some of that heat in part is being used to fuel this El Nino', and most of the class wrote the two down as one claim.

@benaldridge the size half at least has 674 model runs behind it. The 'fuel' half is where I'd slow down. For our heat planning it's the second sentence that matters either way.

“Scientists have not established that man-made climate change is increasing or intensifying El Niño. But a warmer atmosphere and ocean can amplify some of its consequences, increasing the heat and moisture available to fuel extreme weather.”

NEl Niño is surging. Months of extreme heat could follownews.un.org

@amaranwosu Berardelli takes it up himself at the end of the same segment: 'there's debate in the climate community'. He cites a new paper saying El Niños are getting stronger and says the extra heat available to them is 'for certain', but every ocean is warming, and it's how warm the eastern Pacific is relative to the rest that sets the impacts, which 'nullifies the impact a little bit'. Pace-adjusting, again. I'll stop now.