Major cities from Los Angeles to Atlanta could face heavier rainfall, flooding and other disruptive weather this winter as El Niño strengthens, AccuWeather lead long-range expert Paul Pastelok told Newsweek. Federal forecasters said Thursday that the phenomenon is expected to strengthen through the end of the year, with a greater than 90 percent chance it will become a very strong event during fall and winter. El Niño is the warm phase of the El Niño-Southern Oscillation, or ENSO, a recurring Pacific climate pattern that can affect weather worldwide.
Its counterpart, La Niña, is the cool phase of the cycle. Typical El Niño effects can include stormier weather across the South, drier conditions in some northern areas and changes in hurricane activity. Some of the strongest El Niño episodes on record have coincided with major weather extremes.
The 1997-98 Super El Niño contributed to destructive flooding in California and Peru, while the 2015-16 event was associated with global temperature records and widespread climate disruptions. Depending on landscape, California particularly can be vulnerable to landslides.” He added that river levels along the Mississippi, across the Tennessee Valley, and the Carolinas could also quickly rise, impacting cities along their pathways. Maps issued last month by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s (NOAA) Climate Prediction Center (CPC) show the agency’s temperature and precipitation outlooks for December 2026 through February 2027.
The temperature outlook favored above-normal conditions across a broad stretch of the country, from the Pacific Northwest and northern Rockies through the Plains, Midwest and Northeast. The strongest warm signal appeared along parts of the northern tier. Above-normal temperatures were also favored across much of the South, although the outlook was less decisive in parts of California and the Southwest.
As for precipitation, this map showed that wetter-than-normal conditions were favored from Southern California across the Southwest, southern Plains and Gulf Coast, then through Florida and parts of the East Coast. In a Thursday update on El Niño, the CPC said there is now a 75 percent chance El Niño will reach historic strength during the October-to-December period, surpassing previous events in records dating to 1950. That probability has increased from 69 percent in the agency’s August update.
It added, however, that while an event of that magnitude would increase the likelihood of typical El Niño weather impacts, those effects were not guaranteed. Contact Newsweek editors for this story: Ben Kelly and Anthony Murray.
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