WASHINGTON — Winter, on NOAA’s reading, will be driven by El Niño — and not a weak one.
Thursday brought the seasonal forecast the agency issues each fall. NOAA’s version this year runs December 2026 to February 2027, and it leans hard on El Niño — a very strong one. Put the temperature and precipitation maps together and the tilt is north-south: warmth favored in the North, a wetter pattern in the South and up the Eastern Seaboard.
Start with temperature. The Pacific Northwest has the strongest lean toward warmth, and the northern Rockies, the Midwest and the Mississippi Valley are not far behind. Much of the East and Alaska lean warm, too. Nowhere on the map is favored to finish the winter colder than normal.
Florida and parts of the Southeast are the exception, of a sort. There, near-normal temperatures are the most likely outcome.
Rain and snow follow a different line. From California across the South to Florida, NOAA favors a wetter winter, and the East Coast is in that band as well. The Southwest is too. Go the other way in parts of the northern Rockies and around the Great Lakes — drier there, and drier in central Alaska.
Ken Graham runs the National Weather Service. His explanation, in the release, comes down to the jet stream: a very strong El Niño tends to push it south and east, and that makes stormier weather across the South more likely.
That is not all good news, Graham noted. Stormier weather cuts both ways, he pointed out — welcome relief where drought has taken hold, but a flood and mudslide risk when a lot of rain hits ground that has been dry for months. His advice was to plan now, before winter starts.
Drought is where the two halves of the outlook meet. By the end of January, NOAA expects conditions to improve or end across the Southwest and the Southern Great Plains, and in the Southeast and parts of the East Coast. The northern Rockies go the other way. There, and in northeastern Oregon and eastern Washington, drought is favored to develop or get worse.
One limit is worth keeping in mind. The outlook is about odds — whether temperature and total precipitation end up above, near or below average over three months. It says nothing about how much snow any one place will get. Snowfall, NOAA notes, is generally not predictable more than a week out.
There are new tools this season, the agency said. A Probabilistic Precipitation Portal is now running, letting users see low-end, expected and high-end amounts for snow, ice and rain. Forecasters will also use the words “Particularly Dangerous Situation” in some Blizzard Warnings and Ice Storm Warnings, for the rare storms they judge historic in severity.
This is not the final word for the season. The Weather Prediction Center updates the three-month outlook every month, and the next one is due Nov. 19.
