- NOAA's Climate Prediction Center now puts the odds of a "very strong" El Niño this fall and winter above 90%, and gives it a 69% shot at becoming the most powerful event on record dating back to 1950 — and the World Meteorological Organization said on September 3 that the odds of the pattern lasting through February are now close to certain.
- Ecuador has already gone further than any other country in the region: a July orange alert covering 17 provinces was upgraded to a nationwide red alert on August 29.
- Peru declared a water-deficit emergency in 16 regions in mid-August, while Colombia has declared a national disaster over water shortages in more than half its municipalities and is bracing for possible power shortfalls.
- El Salvador and Panama both declared drought states of emergency on August 25, with roughly 6.9 million quintals of Central American corn, beans, and sorghum now at risk and Panama Canal traffic already being cut back.
Off the coast of Peru and Ecuador, the ocean has been running a fever for months. By July, water temperatures in the far-eastern tropical Pacific were sitting nearly 3 degrees Celsius above the long-term average, and NOAA's Climate Prediction Center has kept its El Niño Advisory in place through mid-August, warning that a very strong event is now more likely than not to become one of the biggest on record.
That single ocean signal has already rewritten the calendar for hundreds of millions of people across Latin America. Governments from Lima to Panama City have spent the past six weeks issuing emergency decrees, disaster declarations, and blackout warnings — not because of what El Niño might eventually do, but because of what it is already doing.
An Ocean Signal That Keeps Getting Bigger
El Niño forecasts rarely move in a straight line, but this one has climbed steadily since spring. NOAA's own probability for a very strong event jumped from 63% in June to 81% in its July assessment and then to above 90% in August, alongside a 69% chance that a key ocean-temperature index will land above the threshold needed to beat every El Niño since 1950. Beneath the surface, forecasters have tracked subsurface heat anomalies of roughly 10 degrees Celsius at depth in the tropical Pacific — a reserve of warm water that tends to keep feeding the event as it develops into early 2027.
None of that is abstract for the countries in its path. The same ocean pattern is triggering opposite disasters depending on geography: flooding in some places, drought in others, and — in Ecuador's case — enough uncertainty that authorities have raised their alert level three times in four months.
Ecuador Goes From Watching to Red Alert Nationwide
Ecuador has moved faster than any of its neighbors. The country's risk-management authority issued a yellow alert on May 18, then raised it to orange on July 20 across 17 provinces, 143 cantons, and 491 parishes below 1,500 meters in elevation — the zones historically most exposed to flooding and landslides. At the time, officials were careful to note that El Niño itself had not yet been formally declared; the heightened alert was preparation, not confirmation.
By late August, that caution had run out. On August 29, Ecuador's Secretaría Nacional de Gestión de Riesgos extended a red alert to all 24 provinces, confirming the event is now active and could intensify sharply in the year's final months. Roughly 1.3 million Ecuadorians are estimated to be in the path of potential flooding, landslides, and storm damage.
Peru's New President Signs a Water Emergency Into Law
In Peru, the response has come from a government that barely existed six months ago. Keiko Fujimori, sworn in as president on July 28 after winning a June runoff, signed a decree on August 13 placing 607 districts across 16 regions — Apurímac, Arequipa, Ayacucho, Cusco, Huancavelica, Huánuco, Junín, La Libertad, Loreto, Madre de Dios, Moquegua, Pasco, Puno, San Martín, Tacna, and Ucayali — under a 60-day state of emergency tied to an expected water deficit during the 2026-2027 rainy season. The decree is meant to speed up funding for regional governments as reservoir levels and river flows show early signs of decline.
Peru is also watching its coast for the opposite problem. National disaster-risk officials estimate that more than 9 million Peruvians live in zones at very high risk of flooding and landslides, a grim echo of the 2023 El Niño episode that killed nearly 100 people in the country. Fujimori has since toured coastal regions where crews are clearing riverbeds ahead of the rainy season, and by mid-August her government had also declared emergencies for rain-damaged districts in and around Lima.
Colombia's Grid Faces a Widening Gap
Roughly two-thirds of Colombia's electricity comes from hydropower, which makes the country's grid unusually exposed to a dry El Niño year. Grid operator XM's most recent projection, published in late July, put the annual shortfall between expected demand and guaranteed firm-power capacity at 5,468 gigawatt-hours a year through 2026-2027 — a sharper warning than the 3,906-gigawatt-hour gap XM had estimated just three weeks earlier, reflecting how quickly the outlook has deteriorated. National electricity demand has also kept setting records: after a June average of 261.86 gigawatt-hours a day, Colombia logged its highest single-day output ever, 264.91 gigawatt-hours, on August 5, as thermal plants and warmer weather pushed consumption to new highs.
The government has already moved past warnings and into formal crisis mode. In late July, President Gustavo Petro's administration declared a national disaster, and the housing ministry has identified 558 of Colombia's 1,103 municipalities — more than half the country — as facing high or very high risk of water shortages, with 111 of those considered the most critical. Officials have warned the resulting water and power strain could stretch into the first quarter of 2027.
Central America's Corn and Bean Harvest Is Withering
Inland, the story flips from too much water to almost none. El Salvador's Dirección General de Protección Civil declared a red alert over drought conditions, and Luis Treminio, head of the country's small-farmers' association CAMPO, has told reporters that roughly 6.9 million quintals of corn, beans, and sorghum are now at risk — the entirety of the country's August-to-September planting cycle, which normally accounts for a fifth of national corn output, three-quarters of its beans, and all of its sorghum. Treminio has also said the season's earlier harvest, planted in May and June, likely lost 20% to 30% of its yield to heat and missed rain.
Not everyone agrees on how bad the damage is. El Salvador's own deputy agriculture minister has pushed back on those industry estimates, projecting a corn harvest above 12 million quintals thanks to expanded irrigation and earlier planting — a gap between official and grower-level numbers that is worth watching as the actual harvest comes in.
The crisis has spread well beyond one country's cornfields. On August 25, Panama and El Salvador both declared states of emergency, and Honduras extended its own drought alert to cover roughly 80% of its territory. In Panama, the mismatch is especially stark: rainfall has run about 25% above normal on the Caribbean side of the isthmus but roughly 60% below normal on the Pacific side, low enough that canal authorities have begun cutting the number of daily ship transits through a waterway that carries about 5% of global maritime trade.
What Comes Next
Not every part of the region is drying out. Forecasters continue to expect above-normal rainfall across southern Brazil, Paraguay, Uruguay, and northern Argentina in the final months of the year, which raises its own flood and landslide risks even as it helps some crops. The Amazon basin, by contrast, is trending toward one of its driest stretches in decades — a pattern that tends to accompany the strongest El Niño events.
Economists have already tried to put a number on the regional damage. An April analysis credited to Bloomberg Línea estimated that Andean economies could see growth shrink by six-tenths of a point to nearly two full points, spread across farm output, hydropower, and transport — though that estimate predates the sharper forecasts NOAA and the WMO have issued since, meaning the real toll could run higher. For now, national weather services across the region are urging residents to rely on official forecasts rather than past El Niño years as a guide, since this event is on track to outdo all of them.
