A monstrous El Niño has arrived. Here’s what it means for where you live.

Detailed summary

From torrential rain to overwhelming tides, this year’s growing El Niño could make for a warmer, wetter, and weirder winter.

A monster is growing in the Pacific — not the kraken, but something far scarier and deadlier. El Niño is a natural phenomenon in which a band of warm water forms every three to five years off the coast of South America. It raises ocean water temperatures by just a few extra degrees for typically nine to 12 months and ends up injecting an extraordinary amount of energy into the sky. It’s already the strongest El Niño on record, and it might not even peak for about another month or two.

“Those are actually really big changes for the ocean,” Art Miller, a climate scientist at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography, told Grist in September. “The ocean has a lot of heat content — 1,000 times more ability to hold heat than the atmosphere — so slight changes in the ocean surface temperatures can actually do a lot for the atmosphere.”

While scientists are still trying to figure out how climate change might be influencing El Niño, some research suggests that rising temperatures have led to stronger El Niño events. At the very least, we can use this event’s temporary warming to imagine what the climate will look like by default in two decades, as planetary temperatures continue to rise.

The effects of the current El Niño will be global, and they will be severe. Scientists have estimated that the additional heat alone could kill around 450,000 people worldwide. Drought is gripping some places, like the Amazon rainforest, while extreme rainfall hits others, like the Greater Horn of Africa. And the polar vortex — another phenomenon that periodically blasts the eastern and central United States with frigid air — interacts with El Niño in ways that can scramble weather even further. El Niño, then, won’t just fire heat into the atmosphere — it will fundamentally shift weather patterns the world over.

The atmospheric changes are so complex that different parts of the U.S. will endure vastly different impacts from El Niño.

Which is all to say: Things are going to get very weird, and…

The…

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