U.S. federal agency that monitors oceans and atmosphere, issuing weather, climate, and hurricane forecasts and tracking phenomena like El Niño and tsunamis.
NOAA puts the odds at 83% that the strongest El Niño since 1950 is under way, NASA reports. Satellite maps show the Pacific warming and sea level shifting.
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NOAA's December-to-February outlook tilts the odds toward a warmer northern tier and a wetter south, West Coast and Eastern Seaboard during a record El Niño. The maps are odds, so planners get a lean to start from and no totals to budget against.
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Two Hawaiian reef corals both showed lab bleaching thresholds above NOAA's 4-degree-heating-week level, Florida Atlantic University researchers report. A tolerance score from one coral population cannot be assumed to hold for another species or bay.
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Australia's Bureau of Meteorology says weekly average sea-surface temperatures in the central Pacific are at a record weeks before El Niño's December peak. Planners in exposed sectors still have 1997-98 and 2015-16 as their closest guide, because the record describes ocean heat and no source yet counts this year's damage.
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NOAA's Boyin Huang and colleagues put the 1877/78 El Niño at 2.88C above average in the Nino3 index, among the strongest in modern history. New Scientist traces an estimated 20 million to 30 million famine deaths in India, China and Brazil between 1876 and 1879 to that event.
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Hurricane Isaias killed four people and cut power to at least 600,000 after reaching Florida with 105 mph winds. Its downgrade to a post-tropical cyclone leaves the flood threat in place, with NOAA warning of up to 10 inches of rain in Georgia and the Carolinas.
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USGS researchers say two of 57 seafloor sulfide rocks from the Escanaba Trough heated past 100 C on their own in the lab. The agency says the hazard deserves attention before anyone mines these deposits, on evidence so far limited to processed samples from a single trough.
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Panama was struck on Friday by a magnitude 7.7 earthquake near the village of Pitaloza Arriba, the USGS said. A USGS seismologist says the tsunami threat from the shallow, inland rupture has largely receded; shaking and aftershocks are the hazard that remains.
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Copernicus put August 2026 at 16.96C, a hundredth of a degree above July 2023 and inside its own uncertainty, so it calls the month a tie. The clustering of the record months is the firmer finding.
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Hurricane Isaias, now Category 3, is due to hit the Florida Panhandle, Alabama and Mississippi as the latest first Atlantic hurricane since 1905. Vox credits the recent calm to El Nino, which forecasters expect to be historically bad this year.
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This El Niño is already the strongest on record, running 3.4C above average in an equatorial Pacific region and still climbing, New Scientist reports. The larger worry is climate regime shifts that could persist for decades after the Pacific cools.
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Arctic sea ice shrank to 4.6 million square kilometers on Sept. 12, tying for the 10th-lowest minimum on record, NASA and NSIDC said. Matching a 2008 value puts 2026 in the middle of a low band the ice has held since 2007.
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AL92 has a 90% chance of becoming the Atlantic's first hurricane of 2026 within 48 hours, Gizmodo reports. Gulf Coast and Florida operations can start flood prep now and hold closure decisions until the track firms up.
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Nova Southeastern researchers who cut light by 60% over Florida Keys brain corals in 2024 saw them bleach less than 20 unshaded controls. The summer killed no coral in either group, so the result supports shading as short-term protection for a few chosen colonies.
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University of Miami researchers mapped Guam's Tumon Bay from the air and measured a 59% decline in massive coral cover after Typhoon Mawar. Maps that cover a whole bay at the scale of single colonies could guide where restoration money goes, if the classifier holds up on reef it was never trained on.
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Contiguous U.S. temperatures averaged 57.98 degrees F from January to August 2026, the hottest such stretch since records began in 1895, NOAA data show. Only a cooler-than-normal fall would keep 2026 from an annual record, Zeke Hausfather says.
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Six NOAA DART buoys still showed the Pacific oscillating at 30- to 80-minute periods more than ten hours after Kamchatka's M8.8 quake in July 2025. The authors say that rhythm could help tsunami warnings, but their account stops before explaining how a warning center would use it.
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Tai Tam, a 52-foot yacht, sank about 250 nautical miles north of Norfolk Island on Sept. 26 after hitting a sperm whale. Rescuers say an early distress beacon saved all four people aboard. One wreck cannot show how often yachts and whales collide.
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University of Maine data put the 2026 El Nino's daily anomaly at 3.11C, above a record that had stood since November 2015. The USGS says such events tilt winter odds toward a wet South and a dry Northwest and Ohio Valley, but do not guarantee any pattern.
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El Niño's wind shear has helped hold the 2026 Atlantic to seven named storms and no hurricanes while the eastern Pacific logged eight hurricanes. Both oceans draw on tropical waves born over Africa, and this year those waves fared very differently on either side of Central America.
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