In this month’s ‘In Depth’ section, we discuss the global impact of the Super-El Niño, the warming of the Mediterranean, and science's new challenges in anticipating extreme weather events.
The Pacific Ocean has been sending warning signs for months that we can no longer afford to ignore. The El Niño climate phenomenon has returned, but this time under the shadow of a Super-El Niño. According to experts, this is driven by a completely anomalous warming of equatorial waters acting as a catalyst that threatens to intensify and prolong extreme weather events worldwide.
Until recently, public perception viewed El Niño as a localized or transoceanic event—something that caused devastating droughts in Australia or torrential rains on South America's coasts, but reached the Mediterranean basin merely as a faint, distant echo. However, this buffer created by distance is dissolving. The current Super-El Niño emerges in a global ocean already stressed by decades of anthropogenic warming, acting as a sounding board that amplifies marine heatwaves, alters atmospheric currents, and redistributes the risk of severe weather events.
At our latitude, where climate change has long ceased to be a hypothesis and has become a daily reality—marked by structural droughts and record-high Mediterranean Sea temperatures—the Super-El Niño adds an element of severe uncertainty. How does an unleashed Pacific interact with European atmospheric dynamics? How much of the variability observed along our coasts is a direct consequence of it? Answering these questions is no longer just an academic exercise, but an urgent matter of climate adaptation and land management.
The global atmospheric connection
Although El Niño is conceptually an anomaly in oceanic and atmospheric circulation across the equatorial Pacific, its impact is not confined to that region. This anomaly shifts and alters equatorial atmospheric patterns across the planet's entire tropical belt. As these flows reorganize, convection zones (where rainfall concentrates) and subsidence zones (associated with drought) shift from their usual locations, bringing rainfall to typically arid regions and dry spells to usually rainy areas.
Regarding its duration, despite being a fairly intense episode, it is not expected to be exceptionally long compared to a standard El Niño, whose typical timeframe ranges between six months and a year.
Monitoring and new observation tools
To address these challenges and understand the behavior of such complex phenomena, ICM-CSIC researcher Quim Ballabrera emphasizes that "research and institutions must continue to maintain a multi-instrumental and multi-parametric ocean observation system." Currently, satellites, in-situ buoys, and drifting platforms are used to monitor thermal and dynamic ocean anomalies in real time.
However, the escalating climate crisis is changing the rules of the game. Extreme warming in basins like the Mediterranean Sea—where record surface temperatures were recorded this summer, such as 33°C off sa Dragonera—creates a scenario that defies traditional meteorological models. Such warm waters foster the formation of far more intense and complex storms with quasi-tropical characteristics, which often unleash violent rainfall or move differently than predicted by global models.
In short, the Super El Niño is not an isolated event on the other side of the world, but the visible symptom of an interconnected ocean under unprecedented pressure. That is why, in an increasingly warm and unpredictable Mediterranean, research, continuous monitoring and political will must go hand in hand: only through science-based decisions will we be able to adapt our infrastructure and protect our coastline.