WMO Chief Warns of Potential El Niño Impact: Floods, Droughts, Storms Threaten Argentina

Celeste Saulo, who leads the World Meteorological Organization, delivered a stark warning in early June: the odds of El Niño arriving in South America within the next three months had climbed to 90 percent. What made her alert urgent was not the phenomenon itself—El Niño is a natural climate cycle that occurs every two to seven years—but what it would likely bring to Argentina and the region: severe droughts in some places, torrential rains in others, and the kind of extreme weather that puts lives and livelihoods at risk.

El Niño works by warming the equatorial Pacific Ocean in ways that ripple through the entire atmosphere. The last time it took hold, in 2023 and 2024, those years became the hottest on record. This time, Saulo warned, the episode could be potent enough to worsen both drought and intense rainfall simultaneously—a paradox that reflects how climate systems can be brutally uneven in their effects. For the three-month period beginning in June, the WMO forecast above-normal temperatures across nearly every region of the planet, with additional risks of heat stress, water scarcity in vulnerable areas, and the kind of flooding and severe drought that can reshape landscapes and economies.

The consequences would not be confined to Argentina. Saulo outlined a map of vulnerability across South America and Central America. In Peru and Ecuador, what locals call the Coastal El Niño would warm ocean waters and swell rainfall, devastating the fishing industry that depends on cooler currents. Northern South America, Central America, and northeastern Brazil faced the opposite threat: below-normal rainfall and drought conditions severe enough to strain water supplies and, in past episodes, to compromise the operational capacity of the Panama Canal itself. But the southeast—southern Brazil, Paraguay, northern Argentina, northeastern Argentina, and Uruguay—would experience above-normal precipitation, bringing three cascading dangers: flooding, severe storms, and landslides.

What made Saulo's warning particularly significant was her emphasis on what scientists call cascading effects. El Niño does not operate in isolation. Its impacts ripple through global commerce, agricultural production, water systems, and food security. The phenomenon can amplify when combined with the broader warming trend from climate change, though scientists have not yet established that climate change makes El Niño itself more frequent or intense. Still, when the two forces converge, the result can be more extreme weather events and, consequently, more natural disasters.

Saulo acknowledged the anxiety such forecasts can generate. She urged the public to place trust in national meteorological services—the institutions equipped to translate global warnings into local action and to provide the most current, authoritative information as conditions evolved. The message was clear: preparation matters more than panic. The data was solid. The threat was real. But the response would depend on how well communities, governments, and individuals heeded the guidance of those trained to read the signals in the sky.