New report: El Niño 2026 is now the strongest in 1,000 years. Here’s what that means for your winter forecast

El Niño is now the strongest it has been in 1,000 years, according to new research from the University of Michigan, which reconstructed ocean surface temperatures over the last millennium by looking at fossilized corals in the Galápagos Islands. The study, published in the journal Science, found a large recent increase in the variability of sea surface temperature in the eastern equatorial Pacific compared to previous existing paleorecords. That increase also parallels rising global temperatu...