Expect the unexpected.
This is the message that climatologists have been repeating over the past few years. Well, that, and the word of the season: anomalous (which essentially means, “whoa, didn’t see that coming”). Over the past few years, California has experienced several record-breaking events: “hottest night on record,” the “first-ever tropical storm” and most recently, a “Super El Niño.” Is all of this the new normal, or can modern tools allow us to predict the future?
What Even is a Super El Niño?
A normal El Niño is the warm phase of the El Niño–Southern Oscillation (ENSO), where a warm swell of water moves eastward, suppressing cool water upwelling along the coast, among other interruptions to typical ocean patterns. Usually, this injection of energy (warm water) increases the odds of above-normal winter precipitation across the southern U.S. Massive amounts of ocean heat releasing into the atmosphere increases air temperatures, resulting in the year following a Super El Niño peak being, historically, almost always the hottest year on record.
The catchy term “Super El Niño” essentially refers to a “very strong” El Niño event and is characterized by above-average ocean temperatures of an added 2 C (3.6 F) or more. When ocean temperatures spike this drastically, we can expect rising sea levels, and the increased frequency and intensity of storms. So far, climate scientists predict an overwhelming probability that 2027 will eclipse all prior records to become the warmest year ever observed.
Notably, warming from El Niño paired with warming from climate change is additive. This El Niño’s temporary atmospheric warming influence (+0.2 C to 0.4 C) will occur atop an existing (and essentially permanent) +1.4 to 1.5 C baseline global warming. California is expected to experience significantly wetter-than-normal conditions, which can lead to heavy rain, flooding, mudslides and coastal erosion fueled by high El Niño sea levels.
What Does This Mean for Agriculture?
The prediction for El Niño is not simply “more rain.” Rather, rainfall may become less evenly distributed, with more of it arriving in concentrated storms and longer dry intervals separating major precipitation events. Additionally, a Super El Niño is like a candle that burns hotter and faster, where we expect it to last a shorter amount of time, but the outcomes will be more extreme. While models and other tools are able to predict the probability of events, averages become less useful when anomalous extremes increasingly determine outcomes and agricultural impacts.
Projected climate risks for California farmers include increasing heat and precipitation volatility, drought-to-flood swings, wildfires and the difficulty of relying on historical averages. With a “thirstier atmosphere,” warmer air can increase evaporative demand and draw more moisture from soils, vegetation and water bodies. With warmer nighttime temperatures (such as the record-breaking nighttime temperatures in August 2026), plants may struggle to recover from daytime heat (nighttime warmth can affect respiration, flowering, pollination, fruit development, ripening and quality) or may not accumulate degree days necessary to trigger flowering.
However, despite all of these predictions, some of the more significant flooding events have occurred outside of El Niño years. Models are really only calculating the probability of possible events, not the certainty. Today, modern techniques can leverage machine learning and models, genetics and breeding, biostimulants and other tools to help growers make better decisions despite uncertainty.
Farmers have been trying to hedge uncertainty since the beginning of farming. While we can expect more extreme weather events as the new normal, modern tools help us to predict the probable future. Models can be valuable by presenting several plausible outcomes rather than attempting to identify one certain future. The future of agricultural prediction is less about identifying exactly what anomalous event will occur and more about preparing with resilience against a wide range of more extreme possibilities.