2026-27 Snowfall Outlook: The El Niño recipe, Part 2
A super El Nino is just one ingredient to the larger picture of making a winter forecast. Snowfall will vary depending on the exact setups.
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Now that you know what a super El Nino may bring this winter, let's take a look at the history books and see what past strong El Nino's brought in the winter. It is often the case that everybody wants to talk about snowfall, so let's take a deep dive! One season only brought half an inch of snow, while another season brought nearly three feet of snow.
As we look at seasons past, in the early 1980s, we saw warmer than average winter, some moderate snow events, over two feet of snow for the season at Central Park. 1997-98, a much warmer than average winter, lots of rain though, only half an inch of snow for the entire season. And then 2015 and 2016, the more recent episode here, a much warmer than average winter, but we got the blizzard of 2016. And that is why the winter forecast is a lot like making soup. You have the main ingredient, which is the super El Nino, but then you add on a little salt and pepper and you change the outcome, the taste.
At the very end here, you have to look at the Arctic jet stream and the subtropical jet stream. If they're not buckling, your cold air is locked, your storms don't really form, or if they do, it becomes a lot of rain or mixed situations of rain and snow, but you can still get that buckling jet stream in some cases where the cold air sinks south and the moisture comes north and you can still get that blizzard even when your temperatures are much above average for the season.
