Experts don’t believe El Niño will have impact in Ireland this summer

Experts from Met Éireann said that while El Niño has clear impacts on many regions its ‘influence on Ireland and Europe is comparatively weak, highly variable, and not robust in the present-day climate’.

El Niño translates from the Spanish for ‘the boy’ and refers to warmer surface waters in the Eastern Pacific.

Its counterpart is La Niña, ‘the girl,’ is a cold surface water phenomenon in the same region.

The tropical pacific fluctuates between the two affecting weather worldwide.

“The global mean temperature tends to be higher than average under El Niño conditions, usually with a time lag of several months. The currently developing strong El Niño has the potential, together with the underlying global warming trend, to lead to record high global mean temperatures in the second half of 2026 and in 2027, and to extreme weather events,” Met Éireann explained.

The agency does not believe El Niño will have a significant impact here in the short term.

And, it said: “The global seasonal climate update of the World Meteorological Organization for this summer points in the same direction, i.e. no clear evidence of increased warming in Ireland due specifically to El Niño.

"In a future warmer climate, El Niño may have a greater influence on Irish and European climate according to recent studies, but that would only materialise in the second half of this century under higher greenhouse gas scenarios.”

Met Éireann note the fluctuation between El Niño and La Niña was first observed by Peruvian fishermen hundreds of years ago when they noticed fish stocks being disrupted.