Super El Niño, Part Two: 

Vegas, the Climate, and the Rest of the World

Oct 8, 2026 · Kristen Riffle

I check the weather the way other people check fantasy football

I'm a weather nerd. I read the models before I read my email, and I have opinions about the American model versus the European one that I'll share whether you ask or not. Some people disappear into a video game. I disappear into the National Hurricane Center's cone of uncertainty.

So this is the update to my last El Niño post, and the short version is that it got worse. In March, NOAA gave this thing a one-in-three shot at even being "strong." As of its September update, the odds of a very strong event this winter are better than 90 percent.

The World Meteorological Organization says El Niño is firmly established and strengthening fast, with a near-100 percent chance it lasts through February 2027. The key ocean reading, the Niño 3.4 index, went from +1.6°C above normal in June to +2.5°C in August. WMO expects the October-December average to land near +3.7°C, peaking around December. The old record is +2.6°C, set over the winter of 2015-16.

I'm starting at home, with Las Vegas and the lake. Then the climate piece. Then the rest of the planet, the U.S. first, region by region, then the world.

Las Vegas: the lake is at an all-time low, and one wet winter won't fix it

Lake Mead hit its lowest level ever recorded this August, and that's the story sitting under every other Vegas weather story. On August 7 it dropped to 1,040.5 feet, edging under the old record of 1,040.58 set in July 2022. By August 10 the Colorado River Commission of Nevada had it at 1,040.1 feet with about 7 million acre-feet in storage. The reservoir holds roughly 29 million. Vegas is running on a bathtub that's about three-quarters empty.

It didn't have to go this way. Mead was around 1,075 feet in late 2024 after a couple of decent years, and about 1,059 feet by early December 2025. Then 2026 happened.

The cause is upstream. Mead lives on Rocky Mountain snow, not on rain that falls on the Strip. The Upper Basin snowpack peaked at just 60 percent of the seasonal median this March, and Lake Powell's inflow for the water year is forecast around 3.6 million acre-feet, about 37 percent of average. Nevada is already taking a Level 1 shortage cut this year.

The rules are about to change too. The 2007 guidelines that have run the river expire at the end of 2026. According to one Nevada real estate group's breakdown of Interior's August 21 decision, Nevada's allocation drops from 300,000 to 250,000 acre-feet in 2027 and 2028.

What a super El Niño could do for us

The odds lean wet. In the eight strong El Niños since 1957, the Southwest and Southern California came out wetter than normal from December through March in seven of them, and 1982-83 and 1997-98 ran about double normal. All 13 seasonal models in Zeke Hausfather's analysis lean wet this winter. The miss was 2015-16, when coastal Southern California got only 60 to 68 percent of normal even though most models had called for a soaker. That's the Southwest broadly, not a Las Vegas forecast.

Here's the catch. Rain on the valley floor doesn't refill Mead. The river needs snow in the Rockies, and El Niño's record there is less clear. Ski-industry coverage of NOAA's outlook leans wet for the southern Rockies and the Southwest, which is the part of the map the river depends on. I'd call that a hopeful lean, not a promise. I haven't found a snowfall forecast for the Spring Mountains. A seasonal outlook isn't one.

The preview is this Sunday

My weather app shows a 94 percent chance of rain Sunday, with a high of 69° after 95° today. The reason is Hurricane Rachel, the 20th named storm of the Eastern Pacific season. The National Hurricane Center has her weakening to a tropical storm, coming ashore in Southern California early Sunday, and crossing Nevada and Utah as a remnant low by Monday morning. One GFS model run put roughly 0.4 inches over Las Vegas around Sunday noon. That could shift by Saturday.

The risk here is flash flooding on hard desert ground, not wind. Stay out of the washes.

Climate change: El Niño is the spike, the warming is the floor

El Niño comes and goes on its own. Climate change is what raises the floor it spikes from. Scientists don't see evidence that warming makes El Niño itself more frequent, but a warmer atmosphere and ocean can amplify what it does.

Here's the mechanism. El Niño doesn't create heat. WMO Secretary-General Celeste Saulo says it releases heat the ocean has already stored, and the ocean it's drawing from is the warmest we've ever measured. More stored heat means a bigger release. That's why strong El Niños so often produce record-hot years, like 2024.

The University of Chicago's Climate Impact Lab projects global land temperatures about 1.2°C (2.1°F) above normal in the coming months, with 44 percent more extremely hot days than a normal year. Their framing is that El Niño is delivering temperatures climate change wouldn't normally hand us for about 20 years. They project 451,000 extra heat deaths from June through February compared with a normal year, 239,000 of them in the six months starting in September. Those are projections, not a body count, and the lab says the numbers climb if El Niño lasts into spring.

Climate scientist Zeke Hausfather puts the odds that 2027 becomes the warmest year on record at 95 to 96 percent, up from about 85 percent in April. Global temperature lags the tropical Pacific by a few months, so the heat shows up next year.

Then there's the stuff that doesn't snap back. Tropical drought and fire weaken the land's ability to soak up carbon, and the growth rate of CO2 at Mauna Loa hit a record 3.33 parts per million in 2024. Hausfather expects a similar spike in 2027. The last global coral bleaching event hit 84 percent of the world's reef area, and a stronger El Niño is arriving before those reefs recovered. The 2023-24 Amazon drought is a good example of the double hit: World Weather Attribution found El Niño and warming contributed about equally to the rainfall deficit, with the long-term drying trend almost entirely due to warming.

A note on the word "super." It isn't a formal scientific category. NOAA says "very strong." I'll keep saying super because I'm not a government agency.

The United States: warm in the north, wet in the south

The broad U.S. pattern is a warm northern tier and a wet southern tier. NOAA's own warning applies to all of it: an event this big raises the odds of the classic El Niño impacts, and nothing is guaranteed.

Northeast

The Northeast leans warmer than normal this winter, and it looks like a storm-by-storm season. NOAA's outlook shows above-normal temperatures from the Pacific Northwest across the northern tier to the Northeast. Coverage of the outlook has the Northeast wetter but warmer, with the inland high country still cold enough for heavy, wet snow in January and February. Expect great conditions right after a storm and a fast meltdown between them.

Southeast and Gulf Coast

The Southeast is the most dependable wet signal in the country. From December through February, the Gulf Coast and Southeast were wetter than normal in all eight strong El Niños since 1957, hitting 151 percent of normal in 1982-83 and 168 percent in 1997-98. All 13 seasonal models in Hausfather's analysis agree on wet again. Cuba and the Bahamas follow the same pattern.

Hurricanes get weird. El Niño usually suppresses the Atlantic with wind shear, and meteorologist Ryan Maue credits that shear for holding Hurricane Isaias back from becoming a Category 5 in the Gulf. Pressure was still falling, he said, and he gave it a good chance of becoming a Category 3 within 24 hours. Earlier forecasts pointed Isaias at the northern Gulf Coast this weekend, so watch the NHC.

Pacific

Southern California and the Southwest are the wet bets, covered above. Northern California is less certain. It was wetter than normal in six of eight strong events, but it also runs wet in a lot of La Niña winters, so the signal isn't specific to El Niño. The Pacific Northwest is a split decision. The classic El Niño pattern is a dry, low-snow winter, and that showed up in seven of eight past events, though the typical dry anomaly is small. A summary of NOAA's forecast discussion says the forecaster deliberately left the dry tilt off the coast, because some of the closest analogs to this event were wet well up the West Coast. Milder air also pushes snow levels up and turns more valley precipitation into rain. Hawaii runs dry: every strong El Niño since 1972 left it drier than normal in winter.

The Eastern Pacific is already the busiest part of the map. AP reports experts tie this unusually active hurricane season to El Niño's warmer water and wind patterns. Rachel's swells are hitting Southern California beaches with rip currents, and her remnants are due onshore Sunday. NOAA put up to 2 inches of rain in the eastern Los Angeles County mountains, with Orange and San Diego counties the likeliest to see strong winds and damaging waves.

Central U.S.

The Central U.S. is the least certain. NOAA's strongest warm signal covers the northern tier, including the northern Plains and Great Lakes, with drier odds for Montana, the northern Rockies and the Great Lakes. The Ohio Valley is a coin flip: it was drier than normal in only four of the eight past strong events, and most of this year's models lean wet. Texas and the southern Plains sit under the wet Gulf Coast signal. Someone online joked that this El Niño turns Texas into the ice planet Hoth. It doesn't. Think stormier, not frozen.

Europe: mild and wetter is the lean, but nobody knows

Europe is the least predictable stop on the tour. The EU's Copernicus service, in its September 10 seasonal forecast, shows above-average temperatures across nearly all of Europe this winter and a wetter-than-normal season for much of the continent. WMO's outlook is more split, with wetter conditions more likely in southern Europe and drier in the north.

Treat all of that as a lean. Hausfather left most of Europe off his impacts map on purpose, because the El Niño connection there is weak. The classic pattern, a cold north and a wet south in late winter, mostly shows up when a sudden stratospheric warming happens, and those can't be forecast months ahead. Strong El Niño winters since 1950 split four to four on the North Atlantic Oscillation, the pressure pattern that steers Europe's winter storms. Twelve of 13 models lean wet for the UK and central Europe this autumn, but the shifts are small.

Europe has already had its summer of extremes. Severe Weather Europe counted a fifth major heat dome this season, with highs past 40°C over the continent.

Africa: drought in the south, floods in the east, brutal heat in the Sahel

Africa gets pulled two ways, because a positive Indian Ocean Dipole is developing alongside El Niño this year.

Southern Africa is the one Hausfather flags as potentially the most disastrous impact on the map, because summer rain feeds the maize crop that tens of millions of people depend on. From December through February it was drier than normal in six of the eight strong El Niños, and all 13 models show drought this summer. In 2023-24 it was the driest of all eight events, at 69 percent of normal, and the regional humanitarian appeal reached $5.5 billion for more than 61 million people. It isn't guaranteed. The expected drought failed to show up in 1997-98.

The Horn of Africa, meaning southern Ethiopia, Kenya and Somalia, goes the other way. October through December was wetter than normal in all eight strong events, hitting 241 percent of normal in 1997 and 175 percent in 2023. The Indian Ocean Dipole is a bigger driver there than El Niño itself, and all 13 models show a wet season again.

The Sahel's rainfall signal is weak, but its heat risk isn't. The Climate Impact Lab projects about 66,800 extra heat deaths across the Sahel from September through February compared with a normal year, including 31,400 in Nigeria, 17,500 in Sudan, 10,000 in Niger and 8,000 in Chad.

Middle East: the lean is wetter, which comes with a catch

El Niño tends to push more rain into the Middle East, and WMO says wetter-than-normal conditions are more likely over the northern Arabian Peninsula. A study cited by The National points to the subtropical jet stream shifting south, which lets mid-latitude storms reach the region more easily. A Gulf climate researcher told the paper the effect shows up a few months after El Niño locks in over the Pacific, and that a wetter winter is likelier but not certain. Iran's meteorological service forecast considerable rain this fall and winter as El Niño developed, and Copernicus showed parts of the northern UAE, northern Oman and eastern Saudi Arabia on the edge of a wetter signal.

The catch is the ground. A desert that gets a lot of rain in a short window is a flash-flood setup, and the researcher said lasting benefits depend on how intense the rainfall events are. The temperature effect in the Gulf is relatively weak.

Asia: drought and fire in the southeast, a weak monsoon in the south, floods in southern China

Asia has the most reliable El Niño impacts on the planet, starting with Indonesia. September through December was drier than normal in all eight strong events since 1957, at about 73 percent of normal rainfall, and all 13 models show drought again. The danger is fire on drained peatlands. The 1997 fires released an estimated 3 to 9 billion tonnes of CO2, equal to 13 to 40 percent of that year's global fossil fuel emissions, and the 2015 haze has been linked to about 100,300 excess deaths across Indonesia, Malaysia and Singapore. The Philippines was dry from December through April in all eight events, at a median of 58 percent of normal rainfall. The Climate Impact Lab projects 19,400 extra heat deaths across the Philippines, Vietnam, Thailand and Cambodia from September through February, plus 19,300 in Indonesia.

In South Asia, the monsoon is the textbook El Niño casualty. India's 2026 monsoon was running about 12 percent below normal by mid-August, and WMO says dry conditions are more likely across the Indian subcontinent. The Climate Impact Lab projects 15,800 extra heat deaths in India over the next six months and expects India and Pakistan to keep climbing after February. Hausfather says not to assume a weak monsoon next year. In the summer after a strong El Niño, only one of eight was dry. Sri Lanka goes the other way, with its October-December monsoon wetter than normal in all eight events.

Southern China tends to run wet from winter into spring, and 12 of 13 models agree this year. The Yangtze basin often gets heavy rain the summer after a strong El Niño, as it did in the catastrophic 1998 floods, but next summer is beyond the range of any seasonal forecast. WMO also sees Central Asia leaning wetter.

Russia: a warmer, slushier winter is the forecast, with thin evidence

Russian forecasters are calling for a warm, wet winter, but this is the thinnest-sourced stop on the tour. Evgeny Tishkovets of the private Phobos weather center told RIA Novosti that most of Russia will run abnormally warm and humid, up to 3 to 4°C above normal, with the exceptions of the Arctic, northern Siberia and Chukotka. He expects the warmth to peak in February across central and southern Russia, with January precipitation 30 to 40 percent above normal. He also expects heavy snow to alternate with thaws, which brings fog and transport disruptions.

The head of Russia's state Hydrometeorological Center, Yuri Simonov, was more cautious. He said a snowy winter isn't ruled out and that winters have become more erratic.

In the Far East, Roshydromet says the Pacific warming keeps expanding and models show El Niño strengthening through the end of 2026, which has forecasters watching the southern Far East closely this winter.

I'd treat all of this as one forecaster's outlook plus a lean from the warm Europe forecast next door. I couldn't find a seasonal outlook for Russia from WMO or NOAA with the detail I found for other regions.

Everywhere else: Peru, the Amazon, Panama and Australia

The places I skipped still get hit, and a few of them are already in the news.

The Panama Canal is the supply chain story. The canal authority will cap daily transits at 34 ships starting September 4 and 32 from September 15, reversing a May promise of no restrictions. Rainfall from May through August came in 34 percent below the historical average and watershed inflows 44 percent below. The canal carries about 5 percent of global maritime trade, and the 2023 drought cut traffic roughly 36 percent. It's well short of that so far. At the worst point of the last crisis, transits fell as low as 22 a day.

The coast of northern Peru and Ecuador is where El Niño got its name. Only 1982-83 and 1997-98 brought truly extreme rain there, with coastal areas averaging more than double normal. This event looks more like those two. In mid-September the far eastern Pacific was running 4.6°C above normal, compared with 3.5°C in 1997.

The Amazon was drier than normal in seven of eight strong events, and northern South America, meaning Colombia, Venezuela and the Guianas, was dry in all eight. Southeastern South America, including Uruguay and southern Brazil, ran wet in seven of eight.

Southeast Australia was drier than normal from September through November in seven of eight strong events, although that dry signal has a habit of reversing in summer. In the central Pacific, Kiribati and Tuvalu tend to get hit with rain at around double normal while islands in the western Pacific dry out.

What I'm watching next

The peak is still ahead. WMO expects the Pacific to top out around December and says there's a near-100 percent chance El Niño lasts through February, and the Climate Impact Lab says its projections grow if it stretches into spring.

Between now and then, I'm watching four things:

• Rachel's remnants on Sunday, and whether the National Weather Service in Las Vegas puts out a flood watch.

• Hurricane Isaias and where it comes ashore on the Gulf Coast.

• Lake Mead's monthly level, and the first real snow in the Rockies.

• NOAA's monthly El Niño update, which keeps raising the odds.

I'm not bunkering up. I'm keeping a stocked pantry, staying out of the washes on Sunday, and ordering anything that ships from overseas early, given the Panama Canal. Weather nerds don't panic. We refresh the page.