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The story of El Niño — from Peruvian fishermen naming 'El Niño de Navidad' to the super events of 1982-83, 1997-98, 2015-16 and 2023-24, with records going back centuries.
After the 1982-83 El Niño blindsided science, an international decade of ocean-watching — buoys strung across the Pacific, altimeters in orbit, and the first coupled models — turned El Niño from an ambush into a forecastable event.
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Instrumental records of El Niño span barely 150 years, but lake sediments in Ecuador, fossil corals, tree rings and Andean ice cores extend the story back through the entire Holocene — revealing a phenomenon far older than its name, whose strength waxes and wanes over centuries.
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Emerging abruptly from a rare triple-dip La Niña, the 2023-24 El Niño combined with record ocean heat to smash global temperature records — making 2023 the hottest year ever measured and helping push 2024 past the symbolic 1.5°C threshold.
4 official sources cited
Peaking at the highest ONI ever recorded, the 2015-16 El Niño earned its monster nickname — driving the longest global coral bleaching event on record, historic droughts in Africa and Asia, and the warmest year the world had then seen.
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The strongest El Niño of the 20th century killed tens of thousands and cost tens of billions of dollars — but for the first time, science saw it coming. The 1997-98 event was both a global disaster and forecasting's proving ground.
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The strongest El Niño in at least a century developed without its usual warning signs, hidden from satellites by volcanic ash. By the time science caught on, floods, fires and cyclones were already rewriting weather records around the Pacific.
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In 1972, the world's largest single-species fishery collapsed as El Niño shut down the Humboldt upwelling off Peru. The shock rippled from Peruvian ports to global soybean markets — the first widely felt demonstration of El Niño's economic reach.
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The record El Niño of 1877 coincided with simultaneous drought across India, China, Brazil and beyond, and famines that killed tens of millions. Researchers have called it arguably the worst environmental disaster ever to befall humanity.
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A British mathematician hunting the Indian monsoon and a Norwegian-American meteorologist studying Pacific winds discovered, decades apart, the two halves of the same phenomenon. Together their work gave us the concept — and the name — of ENSO.
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Long before satellites and buoy arrays, fishermen in the Peruvian port of Paita noticed a warm current that arrived around Christmas. Their name for it — El Niño de Navidad — would become one of the most famous terms in climate science.
4 official sources cited