Forecasters give this winter a greater than 90% chance of a very strong El Niño, and a 69% chance of the strongest on record. Here is what that actually shifts, region by region, what it does not shift at all, and the one past winter that should stop anyone promising you an epic season.
You have probably seen the headlines. A very strong El Niño is building, possibly the strongest ever measured, and every ski publication is about to tell you what that means for your winter.
Most of them will tell you the same thing: big snow in the south, thin snow in the north, book now. That is roughly the right shape and it is close to useless for planning a trip, because you do not ski a region. You ski one mountain, for one week, on dates your children's school chose for you.
So this page does something different. It explains the mechanism, then shows what actually happened at individual resorts' own snowpack stations in the three strongest El Niño winters on record. And it is honest about the regions where the answer is that this will not change your trip at all, which includes most of the Alps.
If you are skiing the Sierra or the southern Rockies, the odds have moved in your favour. If you are skiing the Cascades or the Pacific Northwest, they have moved against you. If you are skiing the Alps, this is not a useful planning input and you should ignore it.
The forecast itself is not in doubt. NOAA's Climate Prediction Center, in its discussion of 13 August 2026, puts the chance of a very strong event this winter at greater than 90%, and gives a 69% chance of a historic event exceeding every El Niño back to 1950.
What is in doubt is what that delivers to any particular mountain. The Climate Prediction Center says so itself: with an event this size, the chances of El Niño-like impacts are larger, but they are not guaranteed. Hold onto that sentence. The rest of this page is what it means in practice.
This matters because it tells you which claims are reasonable and which are invented. Nobody can forecast a powder day in February from August. What the mechanism does support is a shift in the odds, and here is the chain that produces it.
Everything else follows from those last two steps. It is a change in where the storms go, not a promise about how much falls on your week.
One detail from the August figures is worth understanding, because it is the reason our regional answers differ from a generic forecast.
The Niño-3.4 index, the one everyone quotes, sat at +1.4°C in July. But the Niño-1+2 index, measuring the water off the South American coast, sat at +2.9°C. That gap is the fingerprint of an East Pacific event, the classic kind, rather than the Central Pacific or "Modoki" kind.
It matters because the two types push the jet stream differently. In an East Pacific event the heat source sits further east, the subtropical jet extension is stronger, and the wet-south, dry-north split is sharper. That is the pattern currently loading. If it changes, so does everything below, which is why the Climate Prediction Center issues a fresh discussion every month rather than one forecast in August.
Pro tip: when a headline quotes the record threshold as an ONI value, it is quoting the wrong index. The 69% historic-event figure is measured on the RONI, which adjusts for how much the whole tropical ocean has warmed. In a warming world that distinction is the difference between a meaningful record and a trivial one.
Rather than repeat a regional average, we pulled the snowpack records from the automated stations nearest to each resort and asked a narrow question: in the three strongest El Niño winters on record, how much snow was on the ground at peak, compared with that same station's own typical year?
The measure is peak snow water equivalent, the standard hydrological measure of how much snow is actually sitting on the mountain. Each station has roughly 47 years of daily record. 100 means a completely normal year for that station.
| Resort | 1982-83 | 1997-98 | 2015-16 | Average of the three |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Palisades Tahoe | 256 | 202 | 99 | 186 |
| Heavenly | 231 | 160 | 124 | 172 |
| Northstar | 218 | 180 | 100 | 166 |
| Vail | 177 | 98 | 101 | 125 |
| Winter Park | 142 | 103 | 103 | 116 |
| Jackson Hole | 158 | 104 | 83 | 115 |
| Copper Mountain | 121 | 97 | 109 | 109 |
| Crested Butte | 117 | 101 | 91 | 103 |
| Whitefish | 116 | 73 | 101 | 97 |
| Stevens Pass | 64 | 90 | 80 | 78 |
The first thing is the pattern everyone expects. Tahoe did extraordinarily well: Palisades Tahoe averaged 186% of its own normal snowpack, and in 1982-83 it hit 256%, which is two and a half times a typical year. Stevens Pass in the Cascades averaged 78%, and in that same 1982-83 winter recorded just 64%. That is the subtropical jet, measured rather than asserted.
The second thing matters more, and almost nobody will tell you it. Look down the 2015-16 column. That was a very strong El Niño, comparable to the one now forming, and it delivered at or below a normal year almost everywhere: Palisades Tahoe 99, Park City 92, Brighton 90, Big Sky 89, Jackson Hole 83.
One of three very strong events simply did not produce the expected outcome. That is our own data agreeing with the Climate Prediction Center's hedge, and it is why you should be suspicious of anyone promising you a season.
One caveat on the table itself: most of these stations sit within a few kilometres of the resort, but Whitefish's nearest station is 29km away, so its row describes the surrounding range rather than the mountain. Some resorts are missing entirely for the same reason. Alta's nearest station only began recording in 2022, so it has no very strong El Niño on its record at all, and we would rather show that gap than fill it with a number from the next valley.
Real talk: there are only three very strong El Niño winters in the reliable record. Three. Any confident claim built on a sample of three deserves the scepticism you would apply to any other tiny sample.
Here is the part that gets left out of every seasonal forecast, and it is the part that actually decides whether your week is good.
El Niño winters in the favoured zone are often not just wetter but warmer. More precipitation at a warmer temperature raises the elevation at which snow falls as rain. And your family skis the lowest terrain on the mountain, because that is where the beginner slopes and the ski school meeting points are.
So a resort can post a record snowfall headline while your six-year-old spends the week in rain on the learning area, because the summit was collecting snow and the base was collecting water. A high base elevation absorbs a warm storm. A low one does not.
This is why base elevation is worth checking before you book, in any winter, and doubly so in this one. It matters more to a family than the seasonal total does.
Some of these answers are "this barely moves your odds". Those are the useful ones, because they stop you making a decision on a signal that is not there.
| Where you are skiing | Signal | What it means for your trip |
|---|---|---|
| Sierra Nevada and Tahoe | Favourable, strongest we have | The best supported wet signal anywhere. Two of three past events were enormous, one was ordinary. |
| Southern Rockies (New Mexico, southern Colorado) | Favourable | Sits squarely in the storm track the subtropical jet feeds. |
| Utah and central Colorado | Weak, sits on the fence | Near normal on average. The dividing line moves between winters and within them. Do not plan either way. |
| Pacific Northwest and the Cascades | Unfavourable | The clearest negative signal we measured, plus a warmer, higher rain line. |
| Northern Rockies, Montana, interior BC | Slightly unfavourable | Mildly against, not a write-off. |
| Japan | Mechanism says unfavourable, measurements say only mildly | El Niño weakens the Siberian High and the winter monsoon, so fewer cold outbreaks cross the Sea of Japan, and that sea-effect snow is the entire reason Japan gets the powder it does. We checked the snow-depth records at four long-running northern Japan stations and found only a mild penalty, averaging 92% of normal peak depth. |
| The Alps (France, Austria, Italy, Switzerland) | Too weak to use | Ignore it. Altitude, aspect and snowmaking will decide your week. See below. |
| Scandinavia | Too weak to use | Same weak Atlantic pathway as the Alps, studied even less for skiing. |
| Chile and Argentina | Favourable, but wrong season | El Niño tends to favour the central Andes, but that is the 2027 southern winter, not this one. |
Most English-language coverage will either ignore Europe or quietly imply the North American signal applies there. It does not, and the real answer is more interesting.
There is a genuine El Niño signal in the North Atlantic and European sector, so saying "no effect" would be as wrong as overselling one. It runs through the stratosphere: the shifted Pacific convection deepens the Aleutian Low, which sends more wave energy upward, which tends to weaken the stratospheric polar vortex, which tilts the North Atlantic Oscillation negative. A negative NAO means more blocking and a storm track pushed south, which can favour the southern Alps over the northern.
Two things make that unusable for planning a family trip. It is a late-winter signal, so it says little about Christmas or February half-term. And it has been measurably weakening: research in Climate Dynamics identifies a shift around the 1970s after which the European response becomes very weak or statistically insignificant, and later work describes the whole relationship as varying over decades.
So for a family booking the Alps: ignore El Niño. The altitude of your resort, the aspect of its slopes, its snowmaking coverage and its base elevation will each matter more to your week than this will. Anyone selling you an Alpine El Niño forecast is selling certainty the science does not support.
Some honest subtraction, because a page that only adds confidence is not being straight with you.
Nobody can forecast your week. Seasonal outlooks shift odds across three months. They say nothing about whether it snows on the Tuesday you booked.
Nobody can give you a snowfall total for 2026/27. Any number you see is invented. We do not have one either, which is why there isn't one on this page.
A strong signal is not a strong guarantee. 2015-16 was a very strong event that produced an ordinary-to-poor snowpack across much of the West. One in three, in the only sample we have.
And the mountains you can drive to still beat the ones you cannot. If the forecast tempts you to book somewhere further, more expensive and harder to reach with children, the forecast has cost you more than it gave you.
Concrete, in the order that matters.
In some places, on average, probably. The subtropical jet strengthens and pushes storms into the southern United States, so the Sierra and southern Rockies see improved odds while the Pacific Northwest sees worse ones. But "on average" is doing a lot of work: in 2015-16, a very strong El Niño delivered a normal-to-poor snowpack across most of the American West.
Barely, and not in a way you can plan around. There is a real signal through the stratospheric pathway that tends toward a negative North Atlantic Oscillation in late winter, but research in Climate Dynamics finds it has weakened since roughly the 1970s to very weak or statistically insignificant levels. For a family trip, your resort's altitude and snowmaking matter far more.
The mechanism points that way. El Niño weakens the Siberian High and the East Asian winter monsoon, which means fewer and weaker cold northwesterly outbreaks crossing the Sea of Japan. Those outbreaks are what produce Japan's famous snow, so suppressing them matters. But when we checked the records at four long-running stations in Hokkaido and northern Honshu, the measured penalty was mild: 92% of normal peak snow depth on average, with 2015-16 running 87% to 95% and 1982-83 mixed. The 1997-98 winter has no usable snow-depth data at any of them. So the mechanism is sound and the measured effect is smaller than it implies.
As of the Climate Prediction Center's 13 August 2026 discussion, there is a greater than 90% chance of a very strong event this winter and a 69% chance of a historic one exceeding every El Niño since 1950. July values were +1.4°C in Niño-3.4 and +2.9°C in Niño-1+2. That second figure marks it as an East Pacific event, the type with the sharpest North American response.
Only as a tiebreaker. If you are truly torn between two resorts in different regions, the signal is a reasonable nudge south. If it tempts you into a longer, costlier trip with young children, it has cost you more than it offered. The resort that suits your family's ages and travel is worth more than a shift in seasonal odds.
Warmer wet storms can be. El Niño winters in the favoured zone often run warmer, which lifts the rain-snow line. Children and beginners ski the lowest terrain on the mountain, so a resort can report record precipitation while the learning area gets rain. Base elevation and lower-mountain snowmaking are what protect you from that.
From the automated snowpack stations nearest each resort, run by the US Natural Resources Conservation Service, using peak snow water equivalent for each winter against that same station's own median across roughly 47 years. Where the nearest station sits well away from the resort we say so, and where a station's record does not reach a given winter we leave the cell empty rather than borrow a number from elsewhere.
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No ski region in North America responds to El Niño like Tahoe. Palisades averaged 186% of its normal snowpack across the three strongest events and hit 256% in 1982-83. Here is what that actually means for a family week, including the two ways a huge Tahoe winter can still ruin your trip.
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Transparency note: This content was created with AI assistance and reviewed by Tom Meredith, our editor. Prices, dates, and availability may change. We recommend confirming details directly with the resort before booking.