NOAA's Own Numbers Show El Niño Forecast Climbing From 1-in-3 Odds in March to a 69% Shot at a Record by Year's End

Since NOAA's Climate Prediction Center first put a number on this El Niño back in March, 2026, when it gave only a 1-in-3 chance of a strong event, the agency's own probability estimates have climbed steadily every month, according to Yahoo News.

By April 9, the CPC's strongest-category odds sat at just 1-in-4. By May 14, no single strength category topped 37%. On June 11, the agency confirmed El Niño conditions had actually developed. And in its August 13 discussion, the CPC gave a greater than 90% chance of a very strong event this fall and winter, plus a 69% chance the October-to-December period beats every El Niño on record dating back to 1950, Newsweek reported.

NOAA has been raising the number almost every single month for six straight months.

Three Agencies, Similar Number

The World Meteorological Organization said this past Thursday that El Niño is "firmly established" and its Global Producing Centres now show a nearly 100% likelihood the pattern persists through February 2027, according to Newsweek. WMO expects it to peak near the end of 2026.

AccuWeather meteorologist Alex DaSilva told Newsweek it's "increasingly likely" this becomes the strongest El Niño since at least 1950, the year modern records begin. DaSilva said the pattern is tracked in the ENSO 3.4 region, a defined patch of the eastern Pacific where sea-surface temperatures get compared against the historical average.

"If we see a record El Niño, there is a very high likelihood that global temperatures in 2027 will be the warmest on record," DaSilva said.

Fox Weather meteorologists Ian Oliver and Greg Diamond told Newsweek earlier this month, before the CPC's August update dropped, that the pattern was "behaving like a classic strong one so far" and that a strong or "super" El Niño was "a virtual lock."

None of the three agencies is calling this a formal classification. "Super El Niño" isn't a NOAA term. It's shorthand the agencies and outlets use to describe an exceptionally strong event, and NOAA, WMO and AccuWeather are all converging on roughly the same read even though they use different models.

What CNN Says Actually Happens to the Country

CNN laid out the regional breakdown people actually care about. In a typical strong El Niño winter, the jet stream gets pushed south, meaning more storms and wetter, cooler weather across the southern U.S., while the northern tier runs drier and warmer than average. That includes less snow on average for the Northeast, according to CNN, citing NOAA data.

The Southeast and southern Plains get the opposite treatment: cooler air plus more precipitation raises the odds of snow, sleet and freezing rain, though CNN notes how bad it actually gets depends on how cold the air mass running through actually is.

Florida faces a specifically elevated risk of severe thunderstorms picking back up from late fall into winter, according to Michael Tippett, a climate scientist at Columbia University, cited by CNN. The rest of the Gulf Coast sees the opposite effect, running less active than a normal winter.

Nat Johnson, a meteorologist with NOAA's Geophysical Fluid Dynamics Laboratory, told CNN this El Niño's potential strength is "something that's very unusual, if not a once in a lifetime type of (strength)."

The Honest Caveat

NOAA itself says a historically strong El Niño does not guarantee historically intense weather. The agency's own August discussion states plainly that an event of this magnitude raises the odds of El Niño-consistent effects, but those effects aren't locked in for any specific location.

That's a fair caveat to take seriously. Forecasters have been wrong before about how cleanly these patterns translate to ground-level weather in any one state, and a 69% probability of a record event is still a probability, not a certainty. NOAA's numbers have moved every month this year, and they could still move again before the CPC's next update.

Every CPC discussion since March, 2026, has pushed the odds higher, not lower, and WMO and AccuWeather are both landing in the same neighborhood using separate data. NOAA's next Climate Prediction Center discussion will show whether the 69% figure keeps climbing toward the fall and winter peak the agency has been forecasting since August.