How can El Niño bring drought to one place, floods to another and a quiet hurricane season to the Atlantic?

El Niño can bring drought to one place and floods to another because it moves the engine of tropical weather. In a normal year the warmest water, and the rain that follows it, sit in the western Pacific near Indonesia. During an El Niño the warm water spreads east and takes the rain with it, so rainfall decreases over Indonesia, India and northern Australia, while rainfall and tropical cyclone formation increase over the tropical Pacific. Because so much of the tropics and subtropics feel the shift, it also reaches regions far away at higher latitudes: these long-distance links are called teleconnections.

The same shift reaches the hurricane belts. Over the Atlantic, El Niño increases vertical wind shear, which inhibits tropical cyclones from forming and strengthening, so El Niño years usually give less active Atlantic hurricane seasons. In the eastern Pacific it does the opposite: reduced shear favors above-normal hurricane activity.

The 2026 season, as of October 2026, shows the pattern. After Tropical Storm Arthur in June, an extended hiatus was blamed on El Niño enhancing wind shear across the Atlantic, along with Saharan dust, and the first hurricane of the season, Isaias, only formed on 8 October 2026, tying 1905 for the latest first hurricane. The northeastern Pacific, by September, had about 40% more named storms than average. The charity Americares summed up the stakes as "a global shuffling of risk", and the WMO stresses that the strength of an El Niño alone does not decide how severe its impacts will be in any one country.