El Niño Snow Forecast 2026–27: Where the U.S. Could See More and Less Snow

There is no snow forecast for this winter. NOAA does not publish one, and neither does anyone else who can be checked.

What does exist is a record of what happened in past El Niño winters — and NOAA’s summary of that record is that El Niño takes snow away from more of North America than it gives it to.

Where could the U.S. see more or less snow?

The gains are narrow and mostly high up; the losses are broad and northern.

NOAA’s 1950–2009 analysis puts the largest positive departures in California, Nevada, Utah, Colorado, New Mexico and Arizona — the high country reached by the subtropical jet, where the extra moisture stays frozen.

Five entries on each side is not a 50-50 split. NOAA’s finding from the longer 1959–2023 record is that the below-average area is larger than the above-average area, which is why its summary sentence is about suppression rather than balance.

How much snow did those winters actually take away?

Enough to be worth a number — and the losses are far bigger than the gains.

Everything above this point is directional — which regions lean which way. This is the same question asked with a ruler.

The eight strongest El Niño winters on record were pulled from the Oceanic Niño Index (any of them peaking at +1.6 °C or higher): 1958, 1966, 1973, 1983, 1992, 1998, 2016 and 2024. For each of 27 US metros with a published snowfall normal, the chart shows what those winters delivered against the underlying trend.

The asymmetry is the finding. Buffalo’s eight-winter average runs about 15.6 inches below trend. Cleveland is 14.0 below, Detroit 13.1, Indianapolis 12.1, Boston 11.8. The largest gain anywhere in the set is Baltimore at +3.0 inches, with Washington at +2.8.

That is what NOAA’s phrase about suppression looks like when you put inches on it: the cities that lose, lose a foot or more; the cities that gain, gain an inch or three.

What a normal winter brings, and what those winters brought

Anomalies are hard to feel. Absolute inches are not.

Read the Buffalo row as the shape of the whole thing: a normal winter brings about 70 inches, and those eight winters averaged about 52. The city still got buried. It got buried less.

And read the Baltimore row as the limit of the good news: a normal winter brings 16.4 inches, those winters averaged 19.5. Real, and small.

How thin is the evidence?

Eight winters thin — which is why the counts are published rather than only the averages.

An average of eight numbers can hide a lot. A metro could show a mild negative because seven winters were near normal and one was catastrophic, which is a different world from eight consistently quiet ones.

So here is the count. Of the 27 metros, exactly one — Denver — was snowier than trend in a majority of those eight winters. Detroit and Indianapolis were snowier in none of them.

That is a strikingly one-sided record, and it is still only eight winters. Both of those sentences are true and the second one is the reason this page will not turn any of it into a forecast.

Is there an official snow forecast for this winter?

No — and this is the part most coverage gets wrong.

Even the flagship Winter Outlook, the one whose maps circulate every October, forecasts temperature and precipitation, not snowfall totals. Seasonal snowfall is not something NOAA issues as a national forecast. So an article promising how many inches your state will get this winter is working from something other than a NOAA forecast.

What did NOAA just say about El Niño’s strength?

Very strong is close to settled. Record-breaking is likely but not certain.

The synopsis reads that El Niño is strengthening, with a greater than 90% chance of a very strong event during Northern Hemisphere autumn and winter 2026-27. The 69% figure is the probability that October to December exceeds every El Niño back to 1950.

The gap between those two numbers — about 21 points — is the part still open. It is not whether this is a big event. It is how big.

Does a stronger El Niño mean more snow?

No, and NOAA says so directly.

The composites are averages of past events, and NOAA warns that stronger events do not reliably produce stronger impacts. The most recent very strong El Niño inverted part of the expected west-coast pattern, which is exactly the kind of thing a composite of twenty-odd events cannot rule out.

A record-strength event is a reason to expect an unusual winter. It is not a reason to expect a snowier one, and for most of the northern tier the historical lean runs the other way.

Why can a wetter winter be a less snowy one?

Because snow needs the moisture and the cold in the same place, and El Niño moves them apart.

El Niño pulls the subtropical jet north and east across the southern United States. That wets the southern tier, and it weakens the northern storm track, which dries the north. Snow follows only where the wetter air is also cold enough — which is why the gains cluster in high country and the Mid-Atlantic, and why a wetter-than-normal winter in the Southeast can still be a nearly snowless one.

What this article cannot tell you

How much snow will fall where you live this winter. No forecast total for any location appears on this page, because no defensible source produces one at this range.

The inches above are a different thing, and the distinction matters. They are a record: what normally falls, and what actually fell in eight past winters that resembled this one in a single respect. A record of the past is not a prediction of the future, and eight winters is a thin record even of the past.

It also cannot tell you whether this winter behaves like the composite at all. The sample is thin, the last very strong event broke part of the pattern, and the drivers that decide any individual month are not predictable months ahead.

For the temperature and precipitation maps NOAA does publish, see the El Nino winter outlook . For the temperature side of the same winter, see our 2026/2027 US winter forecast . For what happens to the event after it peaks, we looked at the decay year .

Sources

Checked 18 August 2026. This article contains no snowfall totals and no seasonal snow prediction. No affiliate links, and no payment was received for any link on this page.