Potentially historic El Nino takes shape, with far-reaching US and global impacts expected

El Nino conditions continue to intensify and are likely to be very strong, resulting in a potentially historic event in the coming months that could significantly influence our weather, the hurricane season and global temperatures, according to the latest forecast from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA).

The agency is now highly confident there will be a very strong El Nino during the upcoming Northern Hemisphere fall and winter seasons.

NOAA’s latest forecast says that between October and December, there is a 69% chance of a historic event that would exceed the strength of all previous El Nino events on record, dating back to 1950. The current event ranks as the second strongest on record for this time of the year, behind 1997.

“Our team has become more confident in the possibility of a very strong El Nino by the end of this year,” Michelle L’Heureux, a physical scientist at NOAA’s Climate Prediction Center, told ABC News.

“There is a greater than 90% chance of a ‘very strong’ El Nino, which is the highest chance to date, and expresses our confidence in the growth and development of a potentially historic El Nino event,” L’Heureux added.

NOAA noted that with an event of this magnitude, while the chances of experiencing impacts consistent with El Nino are greater, they are not guaranteed.

El Nino refers to the warmer-than-average phase of the El Nino–Southern Oscillation (ENSO), a natural cycle where sea surface temperatures across the central and eastern equatorial Pacific Ocean rise and fall. The cooler-than-average phase is called La Nina, while near-average conditions are known as ENSO-neutral.

NOAA ranks the strength of El Nino events by measuring the sea surface temperature departure from average (anomaly) across this region, classifying events as weak, moderate, strong or very strong.

While adjectives such as “super” and “extreme” are popular ways of describing the strength of an El Nino event on social media, NOAA and the WMO classify the strength as weak to moderate, strong and very strong. The WMO noted in a recent statement that “the term [[super]] is not part of standardized operational classifications.”

el nino 3 gty er — A thunderstorm crosses the Hudson River from Jersey City, New Jersey, into Lower Manhattan, seen from the 102nd-floor observation deck of the Empire State Building, Aug. 7, 2026, in New York.

Gary Hershorn/Getty Images

Typical El Nino impacts across the United States

Impacts from El Nino, similar to La Nina, tend to be most consistent and pronounced from late autumn through early spring following the event’s onset, NOAA said. There is usually a delay between the onset of the event and many of the associated effects.

Experts caution that the impacts on weather patterns are nuanced. Each season is different, and typical El Nino conditions don’t always materialize.

“The data is very clear that we can be more confident in certain impacts occurring during strong and very strong El Nino, but it is really important to emphasize that even if this ends up being a historic El Nino, there will be impacts in some locations that do not align with the expected El Nino impact,” L’Heureux added. “This is why our seasonal forecasts are expressed in terms of probabilities.”

Northeast: Typically, during El Nino, warmer-than-average temperatures are favored across the northern half of the United States during the winter months. However, its influence is less pronounced in the Northeast, compared to the Upper Midwest and Northwest.

El Nino typically increases the odds of above-average snowfall in the mid-Atlantic and coastal areas of the Northeast as storms often move up the coast. Farther inland, drier-than-average conditions and less snow are more likely.

South: Near- to below-average temperatures are favored along the southern tier of the U.S., especially from Texas to the Southeast.

For precipitation, wetter-than-average conditions are typically observed along the southern tier of the U.S., including parts of the Gulf Coast and Southeast. Below-average precipitation is frequently observed across parts of the south-central Mississippi Valley.

PHOTO: US-NEWS-WEA-CHICAGO-STORMS-TB — A line of severe storms rolls into Chicago’s Austin neighborhood from the west along West Madison Street, Aug. 11, 2026.

Brian Cassella/Chicago Tribune/Tribune News Service via Getty Images

Midwest: Warmer-than-average temperatures are favored from the northern Plains into the Great Lakes. Drier-than-average conditions are frequently observed across parts of the Ohio Valley and Great Lakes regions.

El Nino typically increases the odds of above-average snowfall in the south-central Plains, with below-average snowfall favored in the northern Plains and Great Lakes regions.

West: During the winter months, warmer-than-average temperatures are likely across much of the Northwest. For precipitation, wetter-than-average conditions are typically observed across southern California and much of the Southwest, with below-average precipitation frequently observed across parts of the northern Rockies.

El Nino typically increases the odds of above-average snowfall in the southern Rockies, with below-average snowfall favored in the northern Rockies.

Meanwhile, above-average tropical activity in the eastern Pacific increases the likelihood of indirect impacts to the southwestern United States, such as sending more rain to the region and more frequent flash flood concerns.

Alaska: El Nino impacts in Alaska tend to be more pronounced than across much of the contiguous United States, with the strongest effects typically occurring during the winter and spring months. During winter, warmer- and drier-than-average conditions are more likely, with less snowfall and reduced snowpack.

Above average temperatures often persist into spring, while precipitation trends closer to average. However, warmer conditions typically mean more precipitation falls as rain rather than snow, prolonging snow deficits.

el nino 4 gty er — An aerial view of a truck is seen in floodwater in a field after recent storms in Mokuleia, Hawaii, March 23, 2026.

Stephen Lam/San Francisco Chronicle via Getty Images

Hawaii: Rainfall is typically above average across Hawaii the year an El Nino event develops before conditions become drier during the winter months and remain dry well into the following year. The shift toward drier weather can increase the likelihood of drought and elevate the risk of wildfires.

Meanwhile, above-average tropical activity in the eastern Pacific increases the risk of impacts from tropical systems across the Hawaiian Islands.

How El Nino influences hurricane season activity

While El Nino is only one of several key factors that influence tropical activity, forecasts now indicate it will be a strong event through the peak of the hurricane season, making it the primary driver of activity in both the Atlantic and eastern Pacific in the coming months.

El Nino conditions often suppress tropical activity during the Atlantic hurricane season by producing unfavorable atmospheric winds. In the Eastern Pacific, the opposite occurs, with favorable conditions supporting above-average hurricane season activity.

Other factors, such as sea surface temperatures, also play an important role in tropical cyclone development and strength. Unseasonably warm ocean waters can partially offset the effects of unfavorable atmospheric winds, according to forecasters.

Global temperature records will likely be challenged

2024 ranked as the planet’s warmest year on record, following the last El Nino event, which emerged in mid-2023 and persisted through spring 2024, according to NOAA. However, the return of El Nino means global temperature records will likely be challenged again in the near future, especially since a very strong event is unfolding.

Record highs in global average temperature often occur during El Nino years, combined with the long-term global warming trend driven primarily by human-caused greenhouse gas emissions.

el nino 2 gty er — A man rides his bike along a flooded road near Chiba metro station in Chiba, Japan, Aug 13, 2026, as heavy rain swept through the area.

Philip Fong/AFP via Getty Images

“Warmer ocean temperatures associated with El Nino, together with its tendency to favor warmer conditions in many areas, often contribute to warmer than normal global annual temperatures,” Jon Gottschalck, chief of the Operational Prediction Branch at NOAA’s Climate Prediction Center said.

According to the latest outlook from NOAA’s National Centers for Environmental Information, it’s virtually certain that 2026 will rank among the five warmest years on record, with a 99.9% chance.

However, the probability of it becoming the warmest year currently stands at less than 1%. These odds will likely rise significantly for 2027, based on the latest forecasts.

There is usually a delay between the onset of El Nino and its peak impact on global temperatures, NOAA says. As with the most recent event, its greatest influence often occurs in the months after it peaks, which can keep global temperatures elevated into the following year.

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9 Years Later, the Anya Taylor-Joy Thriller Everyone Missed Is Finally Available To Watch on Streaming

While Sergio Gutiérrez Sánchez’s 2017 psychological thriller Marrowbone arrived early on in Anya Taylor-Joy’s career, it hasn’t achieved the same acclaim as her other early works like Split, The Witch, or Thoroughbreds — but it doesn’t deserve to be forgotten. Marrowbone is a rich family saga, with an almost apocalyptic sense of gloom about it — and a great cast including Taylor-Joy, George Mackay, Charlie Heaton, and Mia Goth (all just a year or two away from major breakthroughs).

The Marrowbone family travels across the Atlantic to New England, where they stay in their dying mother’s estate, adopting her last name after suffering from the abuses of their father. All they know is each other, but on one lovely summer day they meet Allie (Taylor-Joy), a local librarian, friendly and warm.

The movie is a Gothic “haunted house” story, with the dusty creepiness of the Marrowbone estate complemented by the siblings’ decision to stay in hiding (plus conversations about rabid animals and black mold spots). For the romantic midcentury tone the movie strikes in its opening, there’s also a stern warning from the siblings’ dying mother: “Have a safe place ready in case he finds you.” The movie is dark and moody, with a more sophisticated ghostly tone than you might expect from the premise, and an emphasis on familial trauma — secrets and lies hidden in the estate’s attic — that preceded the elevated horror of Hereditary by a year. With it now streaming for free on Xumo Play, it’s worth checking out.

Anya Taylor-Joy Represents The Outside World in ‘Marrowbone’

Allie and Jack lying on a field of tall grass in Marrowbone — George MacKay and Anya Taylor Joy in Marrowbone

Only oldest son Jack (Mackay) is allowed to take liberties to leave, which is how he meets Allie. Jack’s romantic connection to Allie stands in for the whole family’s desire to see her again. She effectively represents the entirety of the outside world, its possibilities and charms that the children are basically forbidden from experiencing. As Allie, Taylor-Joy creates a fantasy role, a more wholesome version of her Last Night in Soho character. (That ability to play the fantastical might explain why she got a role in a Lord of the Rings prequel.) With her loving personality, Allie seems to exist in a different reality than the grimy, scared world of the Marrowbone siblings, who work to maintain the fiction that their mother is still alive. Meanwhile, deep in the attic of the estate, dwells the alleged ghost of their father.

Marrowbone is ultimately a movie about storytelling, and Allie’s position as a librarian and bibliophile means that she is uniquely qualified to play a part in those stories. The illusions that the characters live in and the lies they tell themselves are bolstered by a sweet and soaring orchestral score by Fernando Velázquez, and the traumas of the characters’ past are effectively undercut by the new life they’ve found together, removed from the myriad abuses they experienced under their father. Allie finds her way to the truth of the matter, slowly but surely uncovering the reality of the Marrowbones, and it’s far darker than she could have imagined. As the movie goes on, her own sweet worldview is pulled apart profoundly by her revelations.

‘Marrowbone’ Uses All of Its Tricks to Create a Powerful Illusion

Besides the movie’s use of familial trauma to create a sense of horror and unease, another similarity to Hereditary is its use of the family home. Sergio Gutiérrez Sánchez’s ability to build Marrowbone around the house — its rusted gate, overgrown ivy, and shattered mirrors — plays a huge role in the impression the movie creates. Like Hereditary, there’s long shots from floor to ceiling that are oppressive and stultifying. Jack’s occasional taste of freedom is never enough to make you forget the world the family lives in. And Mia Goth, just a couple years away from creating two iconic horror characters with 2022’s X and its prequel Pearl, emphasizes this the most with her performance. Constantly holding onto little brother Sam (Matthew Stagg), her own motherly nature begins to look defensive and isolated.

The movie’s sense of its era also helps to create the tension between midcentury Americana and horror melodrama. In Marrowbone‘s elaborate production design, viewers get a sense of the darkness underlining its pretty facade, and the performances feel comfortably mannered as well. While Anya Taylor-Joy’s film career began with The Witch, a movie set in 17th century New England, she’s one of those rare actors who can work in just about any era, from 50 years ago to tens of millennia in the future with Dune: Part Two. Her slight 1960s demeanor fits perfectly with the caring naivete with which she approaches the Marrowbone lore. But the movie’s illusion-making comes to an end eventually, as its sharp truths slowly come to light.

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Man used screwdriver to kill wife and daughter at Minnesota daycare, police say

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MINNEAPOLIS (AP) — A man used a screwdriver to fatally stab his wife and their 7-year-old daughter inside a Minnesota daycare Wednesday morning before killing himself, according to a search warrant released Thursday.

The Hennepin County search warrant obtained by The Associated Press identified the man as Nathan Brown, 41. It says he stabbed his wife, 41-year-old Kristen Brown, and their daughter, Evie Brown, inside the daycare that Kristen Brown operated out of the family’s basement in Hopkins, a suburb of Minneapolis. He then fatally shot himself in an upstairs closet.

Hopkins police said in a statement Thursday that they are still investigating.

According to police records, a father dropping off two of his children for daycare heard screams coming from the basement. The father entered the home and initially thought Nathan Brown was performing CPR before realizing it was an attack. The witness called 911 and fled with his children and two other children.

Authorities said Wednesday that they believe Nathan Brown earlier killed a 78-year-old relative at her home in Burnsville, about 20 miles (32 kilometers) from Hopkins. Nathan Brown had recently been living there, investigators said. Police have not released the woman’s identity or said how she was related to Brown.

The warrant says the parent who witnessed the daycare attack told investigators that Kristen Brown had recently sent parents a letter that the daycare would soon be closing, citing “relationship issues with Nathan.”

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EDITOR’S NOTE — This story includes discussion of suicide. If you or someone you know needs help, the national suicide and crisis lifeline in the U.S. is available by calling or texting 988. There is also an online chat at 988lifeline.org.

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Six other children were present, but none were physically harmed, authorities said.

Authorities have not released any information about a potential motive for the killings. They said there was no history of police calls to the Hopkins address.

Records show that Kristen Brown had been licensed by the state since 2019. The daycare had a capacity of 10 children and was found to be in compliance during visits in 2023, 2024 and 2025. Family members of Kristen Brown declined to comment on Thursday.

Kristen Brown opened Brown Bear Childcare a few months after giving birth to Evie. In a 2019 post on the daycare’s Facebook page, Brown wrote that she hoped to help her daughter and other children “blossom into happy, intelligent, caring individuals.”

Kristen Brown had a bachelor’s degree in elementary education foundations from the University of Minnesota Twin Cities and was certified in vision therapy, according to her daycare’s Facebook page. She incorporated music and cooking classes into her days with the children and would take them on field trips to a science museum and an orchard.

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Rico reported from Atlanta.

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Let’s Put Tarik Skubal Back on the Tigers

The Detroit Tigers are one of the hottest teams in baseball. Since the calendar flipped to August, they’ve gone 7-3, scoring more than six runs per game in the process. In a muddled American League, that puts them right in the thick of the AL Central and Wild Card races. That, in turn, means they’re back in the hunt for a World Series ring. This burst of activity has them about as likely to make the playoffs (and win a ring) as they’ve been in the last few months, in fact; they’re back above 30% to reach October after dropping as low as 18% the day they traded Tarik Skubal.

That feels weird! Less than two weeks ago, the Tigers traded their best player, perhaps the best pitcher in baseball, for three prospects. They followed that up by trading Casey Mize, who had briefly inherited the title of top Tigers pitcher. It was a classic deadline sale – not a thread-the-needle plan with some additions and some subtractions, but a declaration that the plan was to get ‘em next year, and the years after that.

Does this mean the Tigers shouldn’t have traded Skubal and Mize? I’m not here to opine on that (OK, fine I’ll opine at the end of the article, but you have to read it first). But they did make those trades, and they did go on that hot streak, so here we are. The Tigers can’t un-trade those guys. MLB doesn’t have a takebacks rule. But I can’t help but wonder how the Tigers would look if they hadn’t made any moves at the deadline, and so I decided to write about it.

The key to answering this question is to build a tool that can take hypothetical rosters (the Tigers with their two top pitchers back) and plug them into today’s actual standings and schedules. Luckily, I have one of those. I told my computer to undo the Skubal and Mize trades while leaving the rest of the deals from the deadline intact. Obviously that’s not a perfect assumption – the Dodgers probably would have landed on a separate starter if they didn’t get Skubal – but it does a good enough job for my purposes, which is to analyze how different Detroit’s path in particular would look if the team had held its course at the deadline instead of pivoting to the future.

The Tigers have backfilled their rotation thanks to some spot starts by Drew Anderson and Jackson Jobe’s return from injury. That’s meaningfully better than nothing; it’s surely part of why the Tigers made the trade in the first place. Even with two remaining starters (Jack Flaherty and Justin Verlander) on the shelf, they still have a functioning rotation. Here’s what it looks like today, with each pitcher’s rest-of-season Depth Charts projections:

Our system has that as the 19th-best rotation in baseball, though my own outlook is slightly rosier; I think that Melton and Jobe are better than their projections imply. The Tigers are in a position to compete for a playoff spot thanks to their pitching, undoubtedly so, but that’s largely because Skubal and Mize each made 16 starts and each notched ERAs around 2.75. After that, it’s been Melton and Montero picking up the slack that Valdez, Flaherty, and Verlander have left; Skubal and Mize recorded nearly as much WAR as the rest of the rotation combined before they departed.

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The Detroit bullpen has been poor so far this year. How poor? Well, we give Tigers relievers credit for 1.4 WAR. Half of that comes from Anderson and Montero’s relief work, though; Montero flexed to the ‘pen when everyone was healthy, and Anderson has spent most of this year as a short-stint reliever. With those two now assuming starting responsibilities, we think the group that’s left is abysmal, a bottom-five unit. Put all of that together, and it’s no wonder that we project Detroit to allow 4.62 runs per game the rest of the way, far more than it has surrendered so far.

OK, then: Let’s bring back the two aces and shift some arms into the bullpen. I swapped in Skubal and Mize for Anderson and Jobe, then bumped those two up to priority bullpen arms to give the relief corps some extra oomph. The new rotation (same as the old, pre-trade rotation) naturally looks a lot better:

Tigers Rotation, With Takebacks

Pitcher	ROS Proj IP	ROS Proj ERA	ROS Proj WAR
Tarik Skubal	48	2.90	1.5
Casey Mize	40	3.76	0.7
Framber Valdez	38	3.81	0.6
Troy Melton	24	4.13	0.3
Keider Montero	28	4.46	0.3

The real question, though, is what that does to their Playoff Odds. We consider the true talent of the Tigers as currently constituted to be slightly worse than a .500 team. With their two best pitchers back in the fold, that true-talent winning percentage goes up 27 points, from .497 to .524. And while that doesn’t sound like a huge move, the Tigers are in the perfect position for that boost in talent to matter most. The AL Central is ripe for the taking. The top four teams are within four games of each other, and while the three clubs that Detroit is competing with all made deadline moves, none was earth-shattering.

It’s not just about a division title, either. Winning the Central comes with a decent chance of a first-round bye, because the AL West has been even worse this year. With the three best records in the American League all residing in the East, whichever team finishes best out of the other divisions is going to get a relatively easy draw considering its final record. That means that adding expected wins is about as valuable as it could get for any of the teams on the AL Central and AL West bubble; more wins doesn’t only make you more likely to win your division or the last Wild Card slot, it makes it more likely that a division title will come with a bye.

Reverting to the old rotation would make the Tigers narrow favorites to earn that bye. That’s a really big deal; winning three playoff series is a lot easier than winning four. It more or less doubles your odds of winning the World Series, because it removes a 50% chance of losing before the tournament really gets going. My model sees it this way, with or without Skubal and Mize:

Tigers Playoff Odds, Two Scenarios

Team	E(Wins)	Playoff%	Div%	Bye%	WS%
Current Tigers	80.1	29.0%	18.1%	9.9%	1.4%
With Skubal/Mize	81.4	41.8%	28.0%	17.2%	3.3%

Like I said, that’s a big bump. Adding two percentage points to your odds of winning the World Series is no joke. Even when we projected the Tigers as clear division favorites before the season, we only gave them a 4% shot at winning it all. Why can adding just two players increase their odds by so much? It’s because they’re in the perfect spot for those wins to apply with leverage; most teams don’t hit August in a position where one win could make the difference between staying home or playing in October, or between a bye and a Wild Card round berth.

I promised that I’d answer whether the Tigers “should” have traded Skubal and Mize, and I came up with a rough framework for that assessment. I took the same tool I’m using to build hypothetical alternate lineups, rewound it to the start of the season, then figured out how much adding a win’s worth of projections at various projected records would affect World Series odds. Here’s a rough distribution of how much an extra win matters, from various starting points:

World Series Odds, Sensitivity To Changes in True Talent

Proj Wins	WS Odds From +1W
78	0.34
82	0.43
86	0.55
90	0.49
94	0.36

Next, I got even more theoretical. I took some distributional studies that got left on the cutting room floor when I updated prospect valuations and worked out, more or less, the odds that prospects of the caliber traded for Skubal and Mize would turn into average regulars or better, plus the average WAR per year delivered in those outcomes. I also looked at the last six years of Tigers teams to figure out how many extra wins adding players like that to replace weak links would be worth (limiting those weak links to the rotation and the outfield, to match the prospects). I worked out that the guys traded to the Tigers project to boost their average projected wins by around 1.2 per year.

At this point, I’ll stop and point out that I’m doing a lot of approximating, so the error bars are large here. But with that caveat, we can do the math. Say that the Tigers bounce around between 78 and 90 projected wins for the next six years, and take the average of those World Series-odds-per-win sensitivities. Multiply that by the 1.2 wins per year I think the extra prospects are “worth.” Multiply that by six years of team control. You get an added 3.3 percentage points of World Series odds, comfortably more than the boost they’d receive from having Skubal and Mize the rest of the way this year. That might understate it, too. If the Tigers didn’t sell, they likely would have bought, but probably only on the margin, considering where they were in the standings and their underperformance over the first four months of the season. The risk of going all-in would have been too high. While we don’t know the counterfactual there, it’s reasonable to think that it would’ve made their future teams even a little worse, for small present benefit, amplifying the effect I’ve already measured here.

That’s an unsatisfying answer for me, but that doesn’t make it less true. The Tigers stand to benefit a lot from raising their floor in future years. Even though they’re in a place of maximum leverage right now, making the playoffs is not the same as winning the World Series, and even with Skubal, Mize, and a few marginal upgrades, this year’s squad would’ve faced a huge uphill battle, likely underdogs in nearly every round of the playoffs (against various AL East squads and then the ~~Dodgers~~ NL champions). Getting a little better in many future years doesn’t sound as fun as being a lot better right now, but my math suggests that it’s pretty clearly the right move, even taking into account their recent performance.

I doubt the Tigers made this exact calculation when they opted to deal their two best pitchers. But I assume their motivation was at least similar in spirit. I’m all for trying to compete, and I generally dislike teams perpetually playing for the future. But this was an extreme case. The Tigers haven’t been amazing this year, Skubal and Mize were rentals, and they fetched enough return that it looks likely to change the trajectory of future teams enough to matter, given how many weak roster spots they’ve tended to carry and the competitive window they’re in. Not the most exciting conclusion, perhaps, but hopefully a salve to observers who, like me, saw the Tigers start winning and thought, “Boy, Skubal would make this team look better, huh?” They may yet go on a run. Heck, they might win it all anyway, despite making these deals. But even taking into account their winnable division, and even cheating a little and taking into account how well they’ve played after the deadline, I think they made the right decision by the numbers.

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