WASHINGTON (dpa-AFX) - Sea level data from a satellite launched by NASA and European partners shows that a swell of warm water hundreds of miles wide has arrived in the Pacific Ocean off the coast of South America, a sign that El Niño will likely emerge later in the year. Because water expands as it warms, a rise in elevation of an area of the ocean indicates increasing ocean temperatures.
El Niños can cause heavy rains in some regions and deficits in others, influencing daily life and commerce around the world.
Launched in 2020 by NASA and led by European Space Agency for the E.U. Copernicus Program, the Sentinel-6 Michael Freilich satellite measures and maps water height for the entire ocean every 10 days, down to fractions of an inch. In the case of El Niño, the satellite tracks what are called warm Kelvin waves.
An El Niño develops as multiple Kelvin waves appear over the course of several months, and the warm water accumulates off the shores of Colombia, Ecuador, and Peru, NASA said in a press release.
'While this year's event started a bit later than the big El Niños of 2015 and 1997, it's beginning to catch up,' said Josh Willis, a sea level researcher at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California and project scientist for Sentinel-6 Michael Freilich. 'We'll see how big it gets.'
Warmer sea surface temperatures in the central and eastern Pacific affect atmospheric circulation patterns worldwide by shifting the jet stream, which impacts storm tracks. This can lead to heavy rain and snow in some areas and unusual heat and dryness in others. How far away those impacts appear depends on the strength of the El Nino.
In more modest events, like the ones that began in 2018 and 2023, impacts such as drought and flooding were mostly seeb in and around the tropical Pacific. Large El Niños, like the one in 2015-2016, reach much farther, causing drought in Africa and flooding in California.
El Niños usually peak between November and January, so it will be several months before the largest impacts become clear.
'Every El Niño is different,' said JPL sea level researcher Severine Fournier, deputy project scientist for Sentinel-6 Michael Freilich. 'But they almost always make for a hot year and big changes in rainfall in parts of the globe.'
Copyright(c) 2026 RTTNews.com. All Rights Reserved
Copyright RTT News/dpa-AFX
© 2026 AFX News
