Geophysics Seminar - Shang-Ping Xie, "What powered the growth of 2026 super El Niño?"

Speaker: Shang-Ping Xie

Distinguished Professor of Climate Science, Scripps Institution of Oceanography, UC San Diego

More information forthcoming

Abstract:

As early as March, the ECMWF and other climate forecast centers predicted a strong El Niño event for 2026—a forecast that has largely materialized, with Eastern Pacific sea surface temperature anomalies breaking century-long records. This super El Niño shares a distinctive two-part evolution common to the extreme El Niño events of 1982, 1997, and 2015. Specifically, the classic basin-scale El Niño driven by a deepened thermocline is preceded by a springtime (February–May) "booster" linked to the slow eastward expansion of the western Pacific warm pool coupled with westerly wind anomalies. The seminar presents real-time observations in relation to key El Niño precursors in the literature.

Speaker-suggested reading: Liang, Y., S.-P. Xie, A. Fedorov, Q. Peng, and A. Miyamoto, 2026: An eastward-propagating coupled mode amplifying the early growth of extreme El Niño events. Sci. Adv., 12, eaee0444. https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/sciadv.aee0444