El Niño and the Pacific Northwest 2026/27: It Is Not a Drought, It Is Rain

El Niño does not dry out the Cascades. It warms them. Expect precipitation to be normal or better and the snow line to sit higher than you want it to.

Elevation is the whole game. In the last very strong event, the one station we checked above 6,400 feet converted more of its precipitation to snow than usual. Every station below that converted less, and the lower it sat, the worse it did.

Plan for rain at the base, not for an empty mountain. The upper terrain is often fine. The bottom of the hill, where beginners and children ski, is where an El Niño winter is actually lost.

The automated snow stations across the Cascades record two things separately: how much water fell as precipitation over the season, and how much snow was sitting on the ground at the peak of the winter. Comparing the two tells you what fraction of the water stayed as snow.

That ratio is the useful number, because it separates a dry winter from a warm one. A drought shows up as low precipitation. A warm winter shows up as normal precipitation and a collapsed snow fraction.

Here is 2015-16, the most recent very strong El Niño, across the Cascades. Every figure is a percentage of that same station's own long-term normal.

Look at the precipitation column first. Every single station had a wetter than normal season, from 113% to 141% of its own average. By any reasonable definition, 2015-16 was not a dry winter in the Cascades.

Now look at the snow fraction. Six of the seven converted less of that water into snowpack than they normally do, and Stevens Pass converted barely half its usual share: 0.34 against a normal 0.60. It received 36% more water than an average winter and finished with 20% less snow on the ground.

Water arrived. Snow did not. That is a temperature problem wearing a precipitation problem's clothes, and it is the single most important thing to understand about skiing the Northwest in an El Niño winter.

And then there is Harts Pass. At 6,490 feet, the highest station in the group, it went the other way: a slightly wet year that produced above normal snowpack and a better than normal snow fraction. High enough to stay cold, so the same warm wet pattern that ruined the low stations simply loaded it with snow.

Across the three strongest El Niño winters on record, the station at Stevens Pass averaged 78% of its normal peak snowpack, with 1982-83 the worst of them at 64%. That is the clearest negative signal we measured anywhere in North America.

But the three winters did not fail the same way, which is why the average conceals more than it reveals.

• 1982-83: precipitation 94% of normal, snowpack 63%. Normal water, poor snow.
• 1997-98: precipitation 93%, snowpack 90%. A near-normal winter that barely registered as an El Niño here at all.
• 2015-16: precipitation 136%, snowpack 80%. A very wet winter that produced below-normal snow.

Two of the three had normal or better precipitation and below-normal snow. None of the three was a drought. If you plan for less snow you will prepare for the wrong thing. Plan for warmer.

Real talk: three winters is a small sample and we will not pretend otherwise. But the 2015-16 evidence does not rest on three: it rests on seven stations across two states all showing the same divergence in the same winter. That is a different and sturdier kind of evidence.

This is not bad luck. It follows from where the range sits and what its snow is made of.

Cascade snow is maritime. Storms come off the Pacific having travelled over relatively warm ocean, so they arrive wet and comparatively mild. The snowpack that results already sits close to its melting point through much of the winter, which is why Northwest snow has its reputation for density.

A snowpack that already lives near freezing has no margin. Add a degree or two and a meaningful share of the season's precipitation crosses from snow to rain. The same warming applied to a cold continental snowpack in Colorado or Utah, sitting well below freezing at altitude, changes far less.

The Cascades also start low. Several resorts load beginners in at elevations where the Rockies have not yet begun. That is a wonderful thing in a cold winter, because the snow comes right down to the car park. In a warm one it is exactly the exposure that hurts.

None of this says do not go. It says go with a different plan than you would in a La Niña year.

The upper mountain is usually still working. On a day when the base is in rain, the top can be in snow. That is a real difference from a season with no snow, and it means the trip is salvageable in a way a drought would not be.

But your children ski the bottom. Beginner terrain, magic carpets and ski school meeting points sit at the base, which is precisely the elevation band that loses. A family's experience of a warm Cascade storm is decided several thousand feet below where the good skiing is.

So choose on lift-served elevation, and have a wet-day plan. The Northwest has excellent rainy-day infrastructure because it has always needed it. A week with two indoor days and three good ski days is a fine holiday. A week where you booked four ski days and got rain on all of them because nobody warned you is not.

The El Niño picture is close to the opposite in California, and it is a non-event across most of Europe. We cover every region we serve, with the honest answers included, in our guide to El Niño and the 2026/27 ski season, and the strongest positive signal in North America is covered in El Niño and Tahoe.