Last week, Super Typhoon Dolphin became the planet’s fifth Category 5 of 2026, putting this year ahead of the pace of the record year of 1997. That’s potentially good news for surfers, not so great for the more than a million people who had to evacuate cities in eastern China amid fears that torrential rain would cause flooding and landslides.
1997 record year produced 12 global Cat 5s — 10 Northwest Pacific super typhoons plus two off Mexico’s Northeast Pacific coast. However, in that record year, the first Cat 5 didn’t arrive until August. 2026 is running well ahead even of 1997’s own internal clock. The first hit in the Indian Ocean in February, while Super Typhoon Sinlaku, with winds of 185 mph and a minimum pressure of 890 hPa, formed off Guam in early April.
Surf forecasters group 1997/98 among the small handful of truly generational El Niño winters, alongside 1969/70, 1982/83 and 2015/16, that produced the biggest scientifically recorded waves since the sport began measuring them. It was the 1997/98 winter that the Biggest Wednesday swell went down at Outer Log Cabins, that Jaws first came into wider surf consciousness, and that Taylor Knox won the inaugural K2 Big-Wave Challenge with a 50-foot wave at Todos Santos. In 2015/16, you might remember Mark Healey pulling into a closeout what’s been called the biggest Puerto wave ever ridden, or an all-time Mavericks Super Bowl session that Surfline’s dubbed the “day of the decade”.
2026 is shaping up to match or even exceed that historic year courtesy of another steroidal El Niño. The mechanism is straightforward: El Niño shifts the storm track south, meaning the cold storms that generate swell move down into California and Baja’s backyard rather than staying pinned further north. So spots away from the immediate storm center get huge, clean swell without the accompanying wind and rain that hits closer to the epicenter.
“The scientific driver is the same in both years, a very strong El Niño, but there’s some extra multipliers this time round,” said Surf-Forecast Chief Forecast Rob Davies. Davies pointed to reduced wind shear. El Niño suppresses vertical wind shear in the Pacific, which helps storms organize and intensify rather than get torn apart. The Atlantic gets the opposite effect.
“We also have a warmer baseline planet, with decades of accumulated climate change, continued Davies. “Even the same level of El Niño intensity should translate into more energy available for storms than it did almost 30 years ago.” He says it’s difficult to predict, being uncharted territory in scientific terms, but could be significant in how the season will play out.
It all points to 2026’s El Niño shaping up to be stronger than even 1997/98 and 2015/16, the most recent benchmark winters for big-wave surfing at California, Baja, and Hawaii.
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