Super El Niño: Fact or Fiction?

Too Long, Didn’t Read:

Yes, a historically strong El Niño is really happening. No, it does not guarantee you bottomless snow all winter. It probably means a genuinely good year for some regions, an average one for most, and a confusing one for the Northeast, as usual. I have strong, uncredentialed opinions on which region you're in. Read on, or don't, and just go wax your skis.

Intro:

Let me begin by prefacing that I am not a meteorologist. I am simply an optimistic ski tourer who enjoys drinking too much coffee and reading too much news. And perhaps it's the caffeine, but I can't help feeling some jitters about all this "Super El Niño" talk. After a piss-poor winter for nearly all of us in the United States last year, I'm hesitant to get my hopes up. Should the season get dashed again by thin snow and warm temps, my heart may just shatter a second time, and I don't think it can take it.

So, on behalf of my own emotional investment, and hopefully yours, I decided to do the research. Will we have a "Super El Niño" and ski bottomless snow all year, or is this a social-media-hyper-inflated fictional bedtime story? My caffeinated opinion and results follow.

The Basics:

We believe in climate change here, so I'm not going to spend six paragraphs citing sources to convince you the planet's weather is getting weirder and less predictable. For the sake of this blog, I'll assume you have at least an elementary understanding of how human industrial behavior has contributed to a warming climate and increasingly unstable global weather patterns. If you don't, that's a different, much longer blog, and I am extremely unqualified to write it, though very passionate about it.

What you do need to know: El Niño is the warm phase of a natural seesaw in Pacific Ocean temperatures. Normally, trade winds push warm water from South America toward Asia. During El Niño, those winds weaken, and the warm water sloshes back toward the Americas instead (PBS, 2026). Fun fact, it's named after baby Jesus, because 17th-century South American fishermen kept noticing the warm water showing up around Christmas (PBS, 2026). Fisherman folklore, now a global climate indicator. When hasn’t folklore been good for forecasting? Love that for us.

El Niño events tend to build through fall, peak in winter, and split the U.S. roughly in half: the south gets wetter, sometimes to a flooding degree, and the north tends to run warmer and drier (PBS, 2026). It's also, conveniently, the one weather pattern scientists can actually forecast months ahead, which is the only reason I'm able to write this blog with anything resembling confidence instead of just vibes.

The Case For:

Here's where it gets spicy. Several forecasting models suggest this year's El Niño could be the strongest since the 1870s (PBS, 2026). Not "strong for recent memory." Strong since horses were still the primary mode of transportation. And strong for about as long as we’ve been able to reliably track the weather in the western United States.

The UN is not exactly downplaying it either. Secretary-General António Guterres called it a warning that "will pour fuel on the fire of a warming world," with impacts that "hit even harder, travel even further, and cross borders with devastating speed" (PBS, 2026). The last comparably major event, in 2023–2024, was one of the five strongest on record and came with record global heat, severe droughts, and intense cyclones (PBS, 2026). So when people say "Super El Niño," they're not just being dramatic for engagement. It's a real, measurable, historically significant event. The dice are, as one researcher put it, genuinely loaded (NPR, 2026).

What we dream for, harvesting turns like a combine in a corn field.

The Case Against (Or: Why I'm Not Buying My Powder Skis Yet)

Okay, but, and this is the part that matters if you're planning your season around this, a strong El Niño does not mean uniformly great skiing everywhere. It means a strong pattern, and patterns have winners and losers.

The Southwest could see real relief for ongoing drought, with bigger, juicier storms recharging water supplies that have been running a deficit for years (NPR, 2026). That's genuinely good news, water-supply-wise and, I'd argue, powder-wise. Meanwhile, the Intermountain West tends to run warmer and drier in these patterns, which is rough news if that's your home zone and your drought is already a problem (NPR, 2026).

And California is the wildcard that keeps everyone humble. The same strength of El Niño produced historic flooding in 1997–98, but a drier-than-average season in 2015–16 (NPR, 2026). Same label, wildly different outcomes. Which is a polite scientific way of saying: nobody actually knows for certain, and neither do I.

The best line I found on this, from climate scientist Daniel Vimont: "El Niño is like loading the dice. While we're loading the dice for a certain type of response, we still know that in any given year, there are still natural fluctuations that may mask that or cause the response to be slightly different than what we might expect" (NPR, 2026). Translation: the odds are better. The odds are not a guarantee. Keep your receipts and your season pass flexible. (Or buy that touring setup and ditch the resort!)

The author's friend illustrating the attitude of "when there's a will, there is a way". Have you considered that you may not want to ski bad enough? (Activities pictured are not reccomended and may violate our warranty terms.)

My Take (Jack's Takes, Not a Forecast):

I want to be clear about something: I am separating my hopes from my beliefs here, because conflating the two is how you end up heartbroken in February, and I am not talking about being single on Valentine’s Day. My hope is for a great winter for everybody. My actual belief is that it'll be good for some, great for a few, average for most, and genuinely unpredictable for the rest of us. Here's my regional, wildly uncredentialed breakdown:

• PNW: Warm and average snow. A perfectly fine, unremarkable season. Bring a raincoat regardless.

• Sierra: Very warm and wet. Could go either direction into something memorable — see 1997–98 energy, if we're lucky.

• Intermountain (ID, MT, WY, UT): Temperate and dry. Sorry. The drought pattern isn't on your side this year.

• Southwest (AZ, NM, CO): Warm and above-average snow. This is the one I'm genuinely excited about. Of course I moved from Southwest Colorado to Oregon this year so I am convinced all my friends and family will have the winter of their lives because I moved away.

• Northeast: I really don't know. You all seem to get one incredible storm, then watch it melt entirely a week later, every single year, and I refuse to be the guy who promises you otherwise. 

• Canada Coast: Warm and average snow.

• Canada Rockies: Average, and I mean that as a compliment. Average in the Rockies is still a good day.

• Alaska: I have never once looked at an Alaska forecast in my life because I have never had the fortune of riding in a helicopter out into the Chugach, and I'm not going to pretend to start now. Enjoy your twenty-foot snowpack with the structural integrity of the perfect tiered wedding cake. You'll be fine.

Here's the thing about any of these outcomes, good or bad: the uncertainty itself is the actual lesson. If there's a real chance your region runs dry, or runs warm, or just runs weird, the smartest move isn't betting everything on a dream season showing up, it's making sure your setup doesn't need one to be worth it. That's a lot of why we build the way we do. A Hagan setup earns its keep on a thin, scrappy, cobbled-together day just as much as a bottomless one, because the gear was never built around the assumption of perfect snow. Light enough that a long approach to find decent coverage doesn't ruin you, durable enough to take the abuse of a rough, rocky, low-tide season, and it's the same gear whichever region you're reading this from. It's worth checking your kit now, before you find out the hard way which forecast you got.

Closing:

Do you have grief with my takes? Well, you shouldn't, the more I know, the less I know, and I have absolutely no credentials to be spitting out regional weather forecasts. You're just as justified, if not more, in disagreeing with me. But I never claimed to be a meteorologist. I'm just an optimistic ski tourer with too much coffee and a mild obsession with NOAA's seasonal outlook page. And in the spirit of my Dad, who really just taught me not to complain: There is no such thing as bad conditions, just bad technique!

See you on the skin track. Hopefully on real snow, and not just my own blind hope.

#skitouringforall

The author (right) with his Dad (left), and Mazy the dog. Post tour-beverages of your choice always make a low snow day a bit better!

References:

PBS NewsHour. (2026). What is El Niño and how could it affect weather this year? PBS. https://www.pbs.org/newshour/science/what-is-el-nino-and-how-could-it-affect-weather-this-year

NPR. (2026, October 5). 'Super' El Niño is coming. What should you expect? NPR Short Wave. https://www.npr.org/2026/10/05/nx-s1-5981261/super-el-nino-floods-droughts

AccuWeather. (2026). Winter forecast 2026-2027: El Niño to reshape snow, cold in U.S. AccuWeather. https://www.accuweather.com/en/winter-weather/winter-forecast-2026-2027-el-nino-to-reshape-snow-cold-in-us/1940765