El Niño and Pacific Typhoons: The Storms Move, They Don't Stop

The best-known tropical cyclone signal in an El Niño year is the Atlantic going quiet — documented on its own page, and driven by wind shear. The Pacific does something less famous and more consequential for more people: the storms do not stop, they move.

The mechanism is the same one that moves everything else

El Niño's defining act is to shift the Pacific's warmest water, and with it the towering convection that sits over it, eastward along the equator. Every downstream effect follows from that single displacement, and tropical cyclones are no exception.

Where that convection lands, the atmosphere becomes friendlier to storms: more rising motion, more moisture through the depth of the troposphere, weaker vertical wind shear. Where it leaves, the opposite. So the central and eastern Pacific gain the conditions that the tropical Atlantic loses — which is why the two basins tend to run in opposite directions in the same year, from the same cause.

Western North Pacific: the same storms, born further out

This is the basin that matters most in human terms, and the effect there is a relocation rather than a change of volume.

In El Niño years the genesis region of western North Pacific typhoons shifts east and slightly south — away from the South China Sea and the waters just off the Philippines, toward the open ocean near the date line. Seasonal storm counts in the basin are not reliably higher.

What that relocation changes is the journey. A typhoon that forms a couple of thousand kilometres further east has far more warm ocean ahead of it before it meets any land. It has more time to organise, more time to intensify, and a greater chance of finding the conditions that produce a top-category storm. It is also more likely to feel the mid-latitude steering flow and recurve — bending north toward Japan and the open Pacific instead of continuing west into the South China Sea.

Two consequences follow, and they pull in opposite directions:

• Fewer landfalls, on average, in the western tracks. The Philippines and Vietnam have historically seen a lower average number of direct hits during El Niño — which is genuinely part of why El Niño hurts those countries mainly through drought rather than through storms.
• A larger share of intense storms. Longer over-water tracks are exactly the conditions that build category 4 and 5 systems. An El Niño season can deliver fewer landfalls and a more dangerous individual storm at the same time, and those two facts are not in tension.

The islands in the middle carry the other half of the trade. A formation zone that has moved east sits closer to Micronesia, Guam and the Marshall Islands, and those communities tend to see more storm activity in an El Niño year, not less.

Central Pacific: the clearest signal in the basin

Around Hawaii, El Niño's effect is unusually unambiguous. The central Pacific normally sees very few tropical cyclones; warmer water and reduced shear during a strong event change that sharply, and the basin's most active seasons on record line up with its strongest El Niños. 2015 — the last very strong event, and the closest analogue to what is happening now — produced the most active central Pacific season ever recorded.

An active basin is not a landfall forecast. Most central Pacific storms never come near land, and the Hawaiian islands are a small target in a very large ocean. What changes is the number of chances in a season.

Eastern Pacific: stronger, and occasionally record-setting

Off Mexico and Central America, El Niño years run more active and produce the basin's most extreme storms. Hurricane Patricia, in October 2015, reached the strongest sustained winds ever measured in the Western Hemisphere. That is one storm and not a statistic, but it happened in the middle of the last very strong El Niño, in the part of the ocean the event had warmed most.

What this means for 2026–27

The event is strengthening toward its winter peak, which places its strongest influence on the Pacific across the back half of the 2026 typhoon season and into 2027. The pattern above is what the historical record supports: an eastward-shifted formation zone, a livelier central Pacific, and a western basin whose average landfall count falls while the intensity of what does arrive does not.

Read all of that as a shift in the odds. Tropical cyclone teleconnections are drawn from a small number of past strong events, they describe seasons rather than storms, and nothing in them tells anyone which coast will be hit. The useful version is simpler: in an El Niño year the Pacific's storms start from a different place, and a storm that starts further from land is not a smaller problem.

What to watch

Formation longitude is the tell. When systems in the western North Pacific start appearing consistently east of their climatological birthplace, the teleconnection is running as expected — and the recurve statistics for that season usually follow.

The ocean state underneath all of it is the thing worth watching week to week, because every mechanism on this page runs on where the Pacific's warm water sits. The live dashboard carries this week's Niño 3.4 reading and the official seasonal indices beside it, and the anomaly map shows the same thing as a picture: the warm tongue along the equator, its eastward reach, and the pool near the date line that a relocated typhoon season forms over. When that pool is at its broadest, the formation zone has somewhere new to sit — which is the whole of this page in one image.