Why 'Super' El Niño Alone Can’t Explain India's Extreme Heat This Year

The term itself is not an official scientific classification, cautions climate scientist Pratik Kad.

Climate systems are complex, and while El Niño has historically influenced Indian monsoon rainfall and temperature extremes, its impacts are never identical from one event to another.

(Photo: PTI/Altered by The Quint)

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For the past few months, the phrase 'Super' El Niño' has dominated headlines, often accompanied by images of cracked farmland, raging wildfires, collapsing monsoons, and unbearable heat.

Across India where large parts of the country are already reeling under repeated heatwaves, the possibility of another major El Niño event has naturally triggered concern.

But how much of this fear is scientifically grounded, and how much is amplified by media narratives searching for dramatic climate stories?

But First, How Does El Niño Shape India’s Summer?

El Niño is essentially a periodic warming of the central and eastern tropical Pacific Ocean that alters atmospheric circulation patterns across the globe. For India, this often weakens the summer monsoon circulation and increases the likelihood of hotter and drier conditions over many regions.

Historically, several major drought years in India have coincided with strong El Niño events, although the relationship is not perfectly linear.

Current forecasts suggest a high probability of El Niño conditions developing during 2026. Yet, we continue to caution against jumping too quickly to catastrophic conclusions.

Climate systems are complex, and while El Niño has historically influenced Indian monsoon rainfall and temperature extremes, its impacts are never identical from one event to another.

Many interacting factors—from the Indian Ocean state to long-term ocean warming—ultimately determine how severe the season becomes.

Why India Is Heating Faster Than Before

This year’s heat across India cannot be explained by El Niño alone because the atmosphere and oceans are currently interacting in unusually complex ways.

Large parts of the Indian Ocean remain exceptionally warm, with sea surface temperatures continuing to rise due to long-term global warming. The Arabian Sea and the Bay of Bengal have both experienced persistent marine heatwaves in recent years, altering how moisture, heat, and monsoon winds behave across the subcontinent.

India is also warming faster in ways that go beyond rising global average temperatures. One important reason for this is the land-ocean contrast.

Land surfaces heat up much faster than oceans, and large continental regions like northern and central India can accumulate heat rapidly during pre-monsoon months.

When rainfall is delayed or reduced, soils lose moisture and the land surface becomes even hotter because less energy is used for evaporation. Instead, more solar energy directly heats the ground and air above it.

This creates a dangerous feedback loop. Dry soils intensify heatwaves, and stronger heatwaves dry the soils further.

Several studies now show that soil moisture deficits are becoming a major driver of extreme heat across India, particularly over the northwest, central, and peninsular regions.

Beyond El Niño: The Many Forces Driving India’s Extreme Heat

• Urbanisation is adding another layer to the problem

Expanding concrete infrastructure, reduced vegetation cover, traffic emissions, industrial heat, and dense construction trap heat inside cities through the urban heat island effect.

Night-time temperatures in many Indian cities are now remaining unusually high, reducing the body’s ability to recover from daytime heat stress.

This is one reason why heatwaves today often feel more exhausting and dangerous than similar temperature events decades ago.

• Atmospheric circulation patterns are changing as well

Western disturbances, which traditionally bring periodic cooling and rainfall to northern India during late winter and spring, have behaved differently in several recent years. Reduced cloud cover and prolonged dry spells allow more intense solar heating over the Indo-Gangetic plains. At the same time, warmer Arabian Sea temperatures can inject additional moisture into the atmosphere, increasing humidity and making heat stress more severe, especially along coastal and central regions.

• The Indian Ocean Dipole (IOD) also plays a crucial role in shaping monsoon outcomes

A positive IOD, where the western Indian Ocean becomes warmer than the eastern side, can sometimes partially offset the drying influence of El Niño over India.

In some years, it acts as a balancing force for the monsoon. In other years, the Pacific and Indian Oceans reinforce each other in ways that intensify drought risk. The challenge is that predicting the exact evolution of the IOD months in advance remains difficult, adding another layer of uncertainty to seasonal forecasts.

However, the atmosphere does not respond solely to the strength of Pacific Ocean warming. Even a strong El Niño does not automatically guarantee monsoon failure in India.

This uncertainty is one reason scientists remain cautious about the growing “Super” El Niño narrative.

The term itself is not an official scientific classification, but is generally used to describe exceptionally strong El Niño events, such as those observed in 1982-83, 1997-98, and 2015-16. These events caused major global disruptions, including extreme heat, floods, droughts, coral bleaching, and wildfires across multiple continents.

Local ocean conditions, Eurasian snow cover, land heating contrasts, intraseasonal variability, and the evolving state of the Indian Ocean all influence how the monsoon behaves.

Climate Change Has Primed the Region for Extreme Weather

In recent decades, climate change has further complicated these relationships.

Global warming and El Niño can amplify one another in important ways. El Niño temporarily releases enormous amounts of heat from the Pacific Ocean into the atmosphere, often pushing global temperatures to record highs.

But, unlike natural variability alone, today’s El Niño events are occurring on top of an already warmer planet.

Baseline temperatures across oceans and land surfaces are significantly higher than they were during previous decades. This means that when El Niño develops, it now operates in a climate system already primed for extremes. That is one reason why recent years have produced such persistent and widespread heat.

The bottomline is that heatwaves are no longer driven by a single climate trigger. They emerge from many overlapping ones: long-term global warming, unusually warm oceans, shifting monsoon circulation, soil moisture depletion, urban heat island effects, aerosol changes, and short-term atmospheric patterns.

There is also growing scientific discussion about how reductions in aerosol pollution may be influencing regional warming. For decades, atmospheric aerosols from industrial pollution reflected part of the incoming sunlight back to space, partially masking warming over South Asia.

As air quality regulations slowly improve in some regions and aerosol concentrations fluctuate, more solar radiation can reach the surface, contributing to stronger warming locally. This does not mean pollution is beneficial. Aerosols themselves are extremely harmful to health, but it highlights how complex the regional climate system has become.

El Niño May Worsen Extremes, But Panic Misses the Point

The latest forecast from the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) suggests a strong chance of El Niño developing between May and July this year, though there remains substantial uncertainty regarding how intense it may eventually become.

Scientists note that clearer signals typically emerge during the Northern Hemisphere summer, while El Niño events themselves usually peak between October and February.

If a very strong El Niño does emerge, regions already vulnerable to water stress could face increased drought risk, reduced agricultural productivity, and heightened wildfire danger. At the same time, other parts of the world may experience intense rainfall and flooding as global atmospheric circulation patterns shift.

India itself may witness uneven impacts, with some regions facing rainfall deficits while others experience short bursts of extreme precipitation.

But the reality is usually more complicated. Researchers studying El Niño continue to stress that many unknowns remain. The risk is not that one climate phenomenon suddenly causes catastrophe overnight. The risk lies in multiple climate stresses overlapping simultaneously in an already warming world.

This is why discussions around El Niño should move beyond simplistic fear-driven headlines and reducing climate risks to overly simplified narratives—either inevitable disasters or complete dismissal.

The science does not support panic, but it does justify serious attention.

For India, the coming months will therefore depend not only on what happens in the Pacific Ocean, but also on how the Indian Ocean evolves, how the monsoon circulation responds, and how regional heat and moisture patterns interact.

The story is no longer about a single climate driver. It is about a climate system becoming increasingly interconnected, volatile, and difficult to predict.

(Dr Pratik Kad is a climate scientist specialising in climate dynamics, extreme events, and impacts. He serves as Vice-President of APECS, an Executive Committee member of YESS, and a working group member for WCRP's Regional Information for Society (RIfS). This is an opinion piece and views expressed are the author's own. The Quint does not endorse nor is responsible for them.)