“In the spring a young man’s fancy lightly turns to thoughts of love… In this spring the met-crowd sees El Niño force a global shove.”—with apologies to Alfred Lord Tennyson (and to students and teachers of English everywhere)
(The above literary construction is what happens when an atmospheric scientist attempts to mimic the scan/couplets of a great poem—in this case, Alfred Lord Tennyson’s Locksley Hall). All to drive home the point: young meteorologists may be making the most of each spring moment,1 but they and their elder colleagues are meanwhile multitasking—predicting warm-season weather hazards as they develop.
[Image source: WikiArt/marked as public domain]
One immediate concern: How to ensure those warnings are heeded? How to build and maintain public vigilance in the face of summer’s economic opportunities and recreational delights?
In recent years, the National Weather Service has teamed up with the National Integrated Heat Health Information System (NIHHIS) and National Council on Skin Cancer Prevention (NCSCP) to promote heat and sun safety. This year, the social media campaign took place May 18-22. AMS Headlines did its bit, starting on May 18 with an NIHHIS piece on heat safety week and a wonderful conversation with Haley Staudmyer, the first winner of the Richard Grotjahn Research Fellowship in Extremes, highlighting her fascinating research on heat events. We’ll clearly be hearing more from her for decades to come. Two relevant articles were featured later, on June 1: The Potential of Long-Lead El Niño Forecasts; and 2026 Atlantic Hurricane Season Begins.
The bulk of summer hazards certainly lie ahead. But ominously, news and social media give a subjective impression that this year, those warm-season hazards are already in full display. This past March (March!) saw a heat wave spanning western states, with temperatures reaching 110°F in Arizona. A deadly premonsoonal heat wave has savaged Pakistan and India. A European heat wave is influencing French Open tennis play at Roland Garros. Today there’s a special mix of anticipation and apprehension: superimposed on the longer-term trend of global warming, a strong El Niño developing now is expected to generate higher temperatures this year, and record-breaking global temperatures in 2027.
The link is to an article in The Washington Post (one of many covering the breaking story). We learn that record global warmth may bring:
…Reduced hurricane activity in the Atlantic Ocean and possible drought in the Caribbean islands. Increased hurricane and typhoon risk in the Pacific Ocean, including Hawaii, Guam and parts of eastern Asia. Reduced rainfall from the monsoon in central and northern India as well as elevated odds for extreme heat, which could cause droughts that impact agricultural production…
Increased chances for developing droughts in portions of Central Africa, Australia, New Zealand, Indonesia, the Philippines, some South Pacific islands, Central America and stretches of northern South America, including northern Brazil, particularly later in the year. Elevated risks for heavy rain that could cause flooding in parts of Peru and Ecuador, southern Brazil, parts of northern and eastern Africa, the Middle East, the equatorial Pacific as well as the southern United States, especially later in the year…
Above-average summer and fall temperatures in the Western U.S., possibly coming with unusual humidity, downpours and tropical storm remnants in the Southwest and Intermountain West, but dryness and possible drought in the Northwest. Warmer-than-average summer temperatures favored across the Southeast and Mid-Atlantic.
Heat waves: Higher frequency of heat waves across large parts of South America, the Western, Central and Southern U.S., Africa, Europe, parts of the Middle East, India and eventually Indonesia and Australia.
The message to governments, decision-makers, and to you and me is clear: we should worry; and whatever weather brings this year, blame El Niño.
Awareness of heat and sun safety? Job done. We’re duly reminded: put aside concerns about heavy snow, icing, and cold snaps for the moment. Instead, be on the lookout for heat, drought, wildfire, and warm-season storms and their accompanying winds, heavy precipitation, and flooding. But we need to be alert all the time. Everywhere. After all, “fewer Atlantic hurricanes” does not preclude an isolated major hurricane landfall somewhere on the U.S. Atlantic Coast. Just a single hit at a populated area could make 2026 a momentous hurricane year.
The larger challenge: Being told to remain vigilant, everywhere, all the time, isn’t super helpful. Human attention spans and physiological reserves of adrenalin are limited. Populations therefore continue to rely on emergency response—actions triggered by deterministic hazard forecasts. Two questions arise: Can we extend the time horizons and refine the geographic specificity of those predictions? Can we go a step further, and mitigate these perils, reduce our vulnerability more generally, versus relying solely on emergency response?
Some (anecdotal) history. In the run-up to the 1987 El Niño, Dick Hallgren, then-NWS director, shared with a group of us that there had never been a successful El Niño forecast but he had set up an El Niño advisory team for NWS and he expected better results going forward. I remember asking at the time: there’s never been a successful El Niño forecast, and you’re pulling together the people who have been wrong the longest? (Fortunately for my career, Dick saw the irony.) At the time, those same El Niño experts were reminding the rest of us that the worldwide teleconnections extending from El Niño events were like snowflakes—no two were alike. Just knowing El Niño was afoot didn’t pin down what impacts would occur, or where or when.
There’s been progress since.
About that same 1980s period, NOAA was designing and deploying the TOGA-TAO array of instrumented buoys across the equatorial Pacific. This proved to be a game-changer. Detection of the El Niño signal in equatorial Pacific circulation improved markedly, and continues to do so, as Desislava Petrova demonstrates so powerfully in her Headlines piece.
More recently, AI approaches and hybrid models2 are sharpening seasonal forecast products, and linking the forecasts to the implications for agriculture, for wildfire management, for public health, and for other sectors. However, though improved, deterministic forecasts can as yet do little more than refine emergency response.
When it comes to mitigation—building community-level and national-level resilience to warm-season hazards and reducing their impacts—meteorologists need to expand their collaboration with social scientists and policymakers.
That is what makes the generosity and vision of Richard Grotjahn, the energy and ambition of Haley Staudmyer, and the efforts of others like them, so welcome.
