An El Niño of historic proportion is taking shape in the tropical Pacific.
An El Niño of historic proportion is taking shape in the tropical Pacific. As a result, water temperatures off Santa Barbara climbed into the low 70s Fahrenheit in late August, and anglers have reported catching dorado and yellowtail around the Channel Islands.
While 2026 promises exceptional conditions, a new study in the journal Science found that El Niño events have become nearly 40% stronger in the last 40 years than they were in the pre-industrial era.
In fact, the authors — who examined modern and ancient corals in the Galápagos Islands — found that El Niño events in the last four decades were stronger than in any of the 1,000 years prior to about 1850, when humans began impacting the climate with greenhouse gases.
“Thanks to these new coral reconstructions, we can go farther back in the eastern Pacific's past than we ever could before,” said co-author Samantha Stevenson, an assistant professor at UC Santa Barbara’s Bren School of Environmental Science & Management. “When we do that, we see that El Niño has been getting stronger, and that the changes have really taken off in the past few hundred years.”
Read More: University of California - Santa Barbara
Image: Sea surface temperatures in the tropical Pacific Ocean were already far higher than average by the first week of June 2026 due to El Niño. (Photo Credit: NOAA Satellites)
