Starting June 14, many places in northern China will usher in the highest temperatures of the year. Beijing, Tianjin, Hebei, Shandong, Henan and 11 other places will witness continuously high temperatures; some areas will hit 40 degrees Celsius.

Summer has arrived a bit early this year. In the areas that have already entered summer, 90 percent have experienced an earlier onset than usual. Cities such as Wuhan, Changsha and Chengdu even started summer more than 10 days ahead of schedule.

At the same time, many places around the world are also experiencing extreme weather. Spain's State Meteorological Agency said on June 7 that this year's spring is the country's hottest since it began meteorological record-keeping in 1961. The average temperature is nearly 2 degrees Celsius higher than in previous years.

According to the climatologist Maximiliano Herrera, who tracks extreme temperatures across the globe, dozens of heat records have been broken in Siberia as temperatures hit 37.9 degrees Celsius in Jalturovosk, its hottest day in history, on June 3.

Spain reports its hottest spring on record

Heatwave hits China - will this summer be even hotter?

"El Niño is on the way, and we have to prepare for extreme weather response," Zhou Bing, chief expert on climate services at the China Meteorological Administration (CMA), said at an online media briefing on June 13.

El Niño is a phenomenon in which the sea surface temperature is abnormally high in the equatorial Middle East, and conversely, La Niña occurs when the sea surface temperature is abnormally low in the equatorial Central East Pacific. Generally speaking, El Niño and La Niña phenomena will alternate. Since the middle of 2020, the world has experienced a "triple" La Niña event that lasted for three years, and in March this year, the current La Niña event officially ended and El Niño began to appear.

According to the latest report released by the American Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's Climate Prediction Center, there is a 56 percent chance of a strong El Niño forming this winter and an 84 percent chance of more than moderate intensity. "This El Nino developed relatively quickly, one to two months earlier than scientists expected it to appear," Zhou said.

Meteorologists predict that this El Nino will peak between November this year and January next year. It will last for at least 8 to 10 months from May this year.'

According to current mainstream institutional forecasting opinions, a moderate intensity or higher El Niño event is coming globally. "2009 to 2010 experienced moderate intensity, and 2014 to 2016 was an extraordinarily severe event, so this event is in some ways analogous to 2009 to 2010," Zhou said.

By analyzing the conversion of El Niño and La Niña in the past 120 years, the cycle period is generally two to seven years, with an average period of four years. As to whether this year or next year will set the warmest record since 1850, Zhou said it also depends on the strength reached by this El Niño event. "If it can reach the level of a strong El Nino event, the probability of setting such a record will increase, and if it is a moderate intensity event, it is possible to break the global warmest record of 2016 in the next five years," Zhou added.

"The drought caused by El Niño will also increase global forest fires, taking as an example the forest fires that lasted for more than four months in Australia in 2019 and 2020, a fire that released 400 million tons of carbon dioxide into the Earth system and intensified global warming," Zhou said.

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