Could the ‘Biggest El Niño Ever’ Trigger a Real-Life Day After Tomorrow Catastrophe? Experts Weigh In
Remember that sweltering summer we just survived? Well, brace yourself — it’s about to get a whole lot hotter. We’re staring down the barrel of what experts are calling the ‘largest El Niño ever seen,’ and the weather warnings are piling up faster than my unread emails. Rising Pacific Ocean temperatures are setting the stage for this mega weather event, and if you thought your fridge was well-stocked before, you might want to reconsider. This super El Niño isn’t just a headline — it’s poised to shake up global weather patterns, possibly cranking up summer 2027 to a fiery new level. Now, I know what you’re thinking — could this be the moment Mother Nature stars in her own disaster flick, à la The Day After Tomorrow? While that’s a fun thought (meteorologists admit they enjoy the movie too), real life’s a bit less Hollywood blockbuster and a bit more “extreme droughts and floods” — especially for folks relying on the Pacific’s bounty. So, what’s really cooking with El Niño, and how much popcorn should you actually be buying? Let’s dive in. LEARN MORE
The hottest summer on record is going to be followed by the ‘largest El Niño ever seen’ and a plethora of weather warnings have been issued.
It’ll start with rising water temperatures in the Pacific Ocean but warnings to stock up on food and the extreme impact it’ll have on parts of the world is already being discussed.
The one starting this year is expected to be the strongest we’ve had since records began, and it’ll have a major impact on next year’s weather as well as it could make the summer of 2027 even hotter than the one we just had.
Just how bad it’s going to get remains to be seen, and about a decade ago Professor Sybren Drijfhout studied what it would take for an actual disaster to meet the level of the sort of thing you’d see in a disaster movie like The Day After Tomorrow.
The University of Southampton researcher suggested that an El Niño could play a part in making something resembling a catastrophe from that movie into reality.
We are in for a massive El Niño which will have some dramatic weather effects (Fabrice COFFRINI / AFP via Getty Images)
Could an El Niño have an impact like The Day After Tomorrow?
Speaking to LADbible, Matthew Cappucci, senior meteorologist at MyRadar, explained that while the movie is the sort of thing ‘meteorologists like myself like to watch in our spare time’ it’s not something we’ll see in real life.
“Obviously, The Day After Tomorrow is apocryphal. It’s science fiction. The answer is no,” he explained, bursting the bubble of anyone who was for some strange reason hoping a weather-based disaster that wiped out a lot of humanity happened.
On the other hand, he did note some parallels between what’s going on in the Pacific ocean right now and The Day After Tomrorrow.
He said: “If you look in the Pacific right now, the three big hurricanes next to each other do kind of resemble that screen grab in the movie where you have three big storms next to each other.
“It is the first time on record we’ve had a category four and a five simultaneously in the eastern Pacific. That’s pretty impressive. “Otherwise, no. The Day After Tomorrow is just a funny movie.”
If you’re wondering about those storms, they’ve been connected to the El Niño and the triple threats have been named Lowell, Karina and Marie.
We’re not talking disaster movie bad, but the damage they do is still going to be awful for the areas they hit.
“Hurricanes typically form when sea surface temperatures around like 79 to 80 degrees Fahrenheit (26C),” Cappucci explained, warning that if they got up to 122F (50C) that could cause something called a ‘hypercane’, but he noted the climate wouldn’t support it and it’d probably take something like a meteor strike to trigger that.
It’s not going to be like The Day After Tomorrow, except perhaps for the triple storms (ECMWF)
Are disasters from the movies even possible?
Typically the kind of weather events you see in disaster movies are hyped up for the sake of drama, but the senior meteorologist pointed out ‘the world is not immune to cataclysms’.
However, they are fortunately quite rare and ‘happen only once every several tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands of years’.
“We’re only ever one giant super volcano eruption from reducing solar radiation enough to get the world into a snowball scenario, in which case a huge percentage of the human population would probably go extinct,” he explained.
Before you worry about that, be reassured ‘it’s not going to happen anytime soon’ and he put a ‘0.00001 percent chance’ of a massive disaster happening in a year.
In the Earth’s billions of years of life there have been many disasters and mass extinction events, but he reckons ‘it’s not going to in our lifetimes’.
Instead of fretting about the world-ending disasters, the super El Niño is still going to be a major catastrophe for the communities worst affected.
The meteorologist warned there would be an ‘extremifying of both drought and flooding’, suggesting that the likes of Australia, Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia and Thailand could expect to suffer from droughts, whereas Nepal, Mongolia and western China may have more problems with flooding.
Cappucci warned the worst hit communities would be those that depended on the Pacific Ocean the most, as high water temperatures meant there wouldn’t be feeder fish to attract the big fish that fishing ports catch.
Fortunately the kind of weather-based disasters we’ll get aren’t going to be like The Day After Tomrrow, though meteorologist love the movie (20th Century Studios)
How does an El Niño year happen?
Strap in, folks. It’s time for some science.
It all starts with something called trade winds, which are permanent winds around the equator which usually blow from east to west. So in the equatorial Pacific, they blow from the Americas towards Australia and New Zealand.
As the wind blows the water east, it is warmed by the sun, so by the time it gets to the other side of the Pacific, the warm water causes hot air to rise, leading to warm, wet and unsettled weather. Meanwhile, colder water from deeper in the ocean rises in the east to replace the water blown west.
But during El Niño years, this gets disrupted.
When trade winds are weakened or even reversed, the temperature difference between the east and west is cancelled out, and usually cold parts of the ocean warm up.
Rainfall and wind patterns change across the equatorial Pacific, which has a knock-on effect around the world.
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