Seasonal models are predicting an El Nino climate pattern that could be the strongest on record, bringing with it more extreme weather.
“I think we’re going to see weather events that we’ve never seen in modern history before,” WFLA-TV Chief Meteorologist and Climate Specialist Jeff Berardelli, in Tampa, Florida, said Friday.
An El Nino event is expected to develop from the middle of this year, impacting global temperature and rainfall patterns, according to the World Meteorological Organization. While the models indicate that this may be a strong event, the WMO cautioned that the models also have a harder time making accurate forecasts in the spring.
El Nino is a cyclical and natural warming of patches of the equatorial Pacific that then alters the world’s weather patterns. Its counterpart, La Nina, is marked by waters that are cooler than average.
Berardelli said an El Nino event essentially redistributes heat on Earth. Currently, the subsurface heat in the Pacific is moving east across the ocean and ascending to the surface from the deep waters, the initial stages of El Nino.
The WMO's Global Seasonal Climate Update showed that sea-surface temperatures are rising rapidly. There is high confidence in the onset of El Nino, followed by further intensification in the months to follow, according to Wilfran Moufouma Okia, chief of climate prediction at WMO.
El Nino typically occurs every two to seven years and lasts around nine to 12 months, WMO said.
It looks like the predictive models are onto something, said California Institute for Water Resources climate scientist Daniel Swain. That is because the volume and the intensity of the subsurface warm water anomalies — or pulses of unusually warm water that are a key part of El Nino physics— are about as large as we’ve seen in the historical record, he added.
The very strongest events are called “super El Ninos.”
“One of the key building blocks to make it fully materialize is, in fact, occurring,” Swain said Friday. “We still don't know exactly what's going to happen. It's not guaranteed it'll be a super El Nino. But the potential is there for something genuinely remarkable.”
If the Pacific releases a lot of heat, it supercharges the climate system and wreaks havoc weather-wise, Berardelli said. With more heat, there will be stronger heat waves, worsening drought in some areas, but also more moisture in the air that leads to more intense floods, he said.
El Nino also subdues the hurricane season in the Atlantic because there is so much heat in the Pacific that outcompetes the Atlantic, Berardelli added. Places like the Caribbean will be extra dry this summer and likely have fewer tropical systems, he said.
El Nino has global impacts. Across the United States, it looks like this summer will be hotter than normal, with significant heat waves, Berardelli said. While the specifics are hard to pinpoint this far out, Berardelli is also expecting to see more frequent daily thunderstorms in the Southwest U.S.
Forest degradation, driven by wildfires, logging and drought, affects about 40% of the Amazon. This could be exacerbated in 2026 with a strong El Nino.
The excess heat brought to the surface by El Nino, combined with the planet's warming due to climate change, will lead to record-breaking global warmth, Swain said. He expects to see record global warm temperatures later this year, next year or both.
“All indicators are, at this point, that the next year is going to be a pretty wild year from a global climate perspective,” Swain said.
Michael Mann, a University of Pennsylvania climate scientist, said that while El Nino boosts global temperatures a bit for a year or two, it’s basically a “zero-sum game." It typically oscillates back toward La Nina, which in turn lowers global temperatures for a year or two, he added. The thing to worry about is the longer-term, steady warming trend that will continue as long as people continue to burn fossil fuels, Mann said Friday.
Associated Press News Director Peter Prengaman contributed to this report.
The Associated Press’ climate and environmental coverage receives financial support from multiple private foundations. AP is solely responsible for all content. Find AP’s standards for working with philanthropies, a list of supporters and funded coverage areas at AP.org.
FILE - People walk through a part of the Amazon River that shows signs of drought in Santa Sofia, on the outskirts of Leticia, Colombia, Oct. 20, 2024. (AP Photo/Ivan Valencia, File)
FILE - A firefighter battles the Canyon Fire on Aug. 7, 2025, in Hasley Canyon, Calif. (AP Photo/Marcio Jose Sanchez, File)
FILE - Grace Chyuwei pours water on Joe Chyuwei to help with the heat Aug. 3, 2025, in Death Valley National Park, Calif. (AP Photo/John Locher, File)
RICHARDSON, Texas & NEW YORK--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Jul 14, 2026--
RealPage, Inc., a leading provider of AI-enabled software and data analytics to the real estate industry, today announced it has completed its acquisition of Cherre, a real estate data intelligence company trusted by institutional owners, investment managers, and operators worldwide.
This press release features multimedia. View the full release here: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20260714560587/en/
"AI can transform real estate only if it understands real estate," said Dirk Wakeham, President and Chief Executive Officer of RealPage. "Cherre has built the kind of trusted, governed intelligence that institutional owners and asset managers depend on. Bringing that expertise into RealPage means every customer, whether they manage one property or a global portfolio, gets access to a stronger, more trustworthy foundation for their decisions.”
"We've always believed real estate organizations can't make confident decisions on data alone. They need a trusted, connected meaning behind it," said L.D. Salmanson, Co-Founder and Chief Executive Officer of Cherre. "The work we've done at Cherre was building toward the moment the industry needed to move from reporting to reasoning. Joining RealPage lets us bring that future to the real asset ecosystem faster, without changing how we work with the clients who trust us today."
Building the Foundation for Real Estate AI
The real estate industry manages trillions of dollars in assets and supports decisions with consequences that extend far beyond a balance sheet: where capital flows, where communities grow, and how the built environment serves the people who depend on it. The industry is turning to AI to make those decisions faster and with greater confidence. But AI is only as reliable as the data beneath it.
Today, that data rarely agrees with itself. A single property can appear as one address in a leasing system, a different unit number in an operations platform, and a separate parcel ID in a tax record, with most platforms treating those as three unrelated assets. As a result, even a basic question, such as why the net operating income (NOI) changed at a given asset, cannot be answered with confidence. The data may all be there, but until something resolves those identities and governs what the data means, no AI can reason across it.
This is the gap now stalling AI across the industry. Models cannot reason across data that does not agree on what it describes. The industry's AI ambition is sound, but the data infrastructure beneath it was built to report on the past, not to support the decisions that come next.
Closing that gap requires a foundational layer that resolves data into consistent identities, governs what it means, and connects it into a knowledge graph that AI can reason across: why performance moved, what is at risk, and where to focus next.
Why RealPage + Cherre is the Answer
For more than a decade, Cherre has been building exactly that layer, at a scale few can match. Its platform resolves more than four billion entities and four trillion dollars in real assets globally into a trusted foundation, sourced and governed in a secure, compliant environment that institutional owners depend on.
RealPage brings deep operational scale across the property lifecycle, serving more than 42,000 customers and 24 million housing units worldwide. For the operator running a single property, that same foundation means more reliable revenue signals, faster lease-up insight, and data that stays consistent across every system already in use. It is the same governed foundation that institutional portfolio-level reasoning is built on. Together, the two companies connect what happens at the property with what matters at the portfolio and fund level, unifying data, trust, and infrastructure across the entire real estate capital stack, spanning all asset classes.
What This Means for Customers
With Cherre, RealPage customers will gain access to a layer of intelligence built specifically to bridge property-level data with portfolio- and fund-level context, connecting operations to the decisions that depend on them.
With RealPage, Cherre customers will gain the scale, resources, and global delivery capacity of one of the industry's largest technology providers, including expanded engineering and deployment capabilities to take customers from data readiness to AI in production, while continuing to work with the same dedicated team and consultative approach they rely on today.
A Commitment to Openness and Customer Control
Cherre's platform has always worked across any property management system and any data source a customer uses, and that will not change. Cherre will remain an open hub where any application or data vendor can connect under clear permissions, security controls and governance standards. RealPage and Cherre are committed to openness and to governance in equal measure, giving customers the freedom to access and use their data alongside the security and protections they depend on. Customers keep every control and protection they have today, plus new enterprise-grade tools for even finer control tomorrow.
Kirkland & Ellis LLP served as legal counsel to RealPage. For Cherre, Software Equity Group (SEG) served as financial advisor and Goodwin Procter LLP served as legal counsel.
About RealPage, Inc.
RealPage exists to improve the business of living. For more than 25 years, RealPage has powered the neighborhoods people call home, for the capital that enables them, the operators who run them, and the residents who live in them. RealPage is advancing the AI-native platform for real estate operations and institutional intelligence, bringing together agentic AI, advanced analytics, and governed data into one platform. Backed by Thoma Bravo and with more than 8,500 employees worldwide, RealPage solutions help manage more than 24 million units and the institutional portfolios behind them around the globe. For more information, visit realpage.com.
About Cherre
Cherre is the leading real estate data intelligence platform for institutional investors, commercial operators, and real asset owners. Cherre connects, resolves, and governs fragmented data to create a trusted foundation for AI, analytics, and decision-making. Organizations use Cherre to unify information across systems, improve data confidence, and accelerate business outcomes. Cherre powers the data infrastructure behind modern real estate operations. For more information, visit cherre.com.
About RealPage & Cherre
Together, RealPage and Cherre are building the trusted AI infrastructure real estate has always required: governed, domain-specific, and purpose-built to know what every piece of data means, resolve it consistently across every system that touches it, and make it available to AI that can reason on it, so the people making consequential decisions can trust what it tells them. Every recommendation is traceable, every definition is governed, and every data asset stays in the customer’s control. This is the foundation for the next era of real estate AI.
RealPage now with Cherre.
