This year will be a super-duper El Niño. Here’s what Canadians can expect this winter

No doubt, most Canadians have heard of this year’s El Niño, a warming in an area of the central Pacific Ocean that has an influence on weather patterns around the world and which drives up the global temperature. Early forecasts had called for one of the most powerful on record, and it has certainly lived up to its expectations.

This “super” El Niño hasn’t even peaked yet — that’s expected to happen some time in December — but it has broken records with daily ocean temperatures reaching nearly 3.5 C above the 1991-2020 average. The highest temperature before that was in 2015 at 3.08 C.

It may be hard to imagine, but what happens in the Pacific Ocean doesn’t stay in the Pacific Ocean. Instead, this natural phenomenon can bring more rain, droughts or warmer-than-average temperatures across different parts of the world.

So what does this mean for Canada this winter? It depends where you are.

First, don’t blame El Niño just yet for any weather you may or may not like.

Well, not unless you’re in Atlantic Canada. That region has already felt the effects of an El Niño, specifically, no hurricanes or subtropical storms. 

Early forecasts for this year’s Atlantic hurricane season had called for reduced activity in the region, typical of most El Niño years. And those predictions were bang on: there has been only one named storm in the Atlantic basin so far, and the hurricane season ends on Nov. 30.

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But otherwise, the weather we’re experiencing now is just, well … weather.

In terms of El Niño’s larger impacts across Canada, Bill Merryfield, a research scientist with Environment and Climate Change Canada, says those generally don’t set in until late December.

“They tend to sort of intensify as the winter sets in,” he said.

If you’re not a fan of the cold, good news: You can expect a warmer winter.

“We tend to see unusually mild winters really from coast to coast across the provinces. And as an example, winter temperatures during the last two events of this type in 1997 into 1998 [and] 2015 to 2016 in the Prairies were as much as five degrees or more above historical norms.”

People practise their golf swings at the Shooters Family Golf Centre in Winnipeg at the end of January 2024. It was the earliest the centre had opened amid unusually warm temperatures in Manitoba. (Jaison Empson/CBC)

The bad news, particularly for the West, is that it tends to be drier, with reduced precipitation. That’s not great for the fire risk in some regions experiencing drought conditions, especially heading into 2027, which is expected to be the warmest year on record.

At the moment, according to Berkeley Earth, a non-profit climate analysis organization, 2026 has a 96 per cent chance of being the warmest on record  beating out 2024.

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“For the high latitude, starting in December, we’re going to see much rainier conditions in the western U.S. and southeastern U.S., and we’re going to start seeing drier conditions in the northwest U.S. and British Columbia, Saskatchewan, Alberta, the western provinces of Canada,” said Zeke Hausfather, a climate scientist with Berkeley Earth.

Now, there’s no guarantee for anything when it comes to weather, but Hausfather looked at eight of the past strong El Niños, and said that currently 12 of the 13 modelling groups around the world expect those regions to experience 19 per cent less rainfall.

Hausfather also looked at the models for warmth.

“All of Canada is warmer. And again, some of this is climate change, right? Because this is the 1991 to 2020 average,” he said. “And it’s particularly pronounced in central and northern Canada, and to an extent in Eastern Canada.”

This map illustrates the El Niño 2026-2027 forecast for North America from October 2026 to February 2027. Canada is expected to experience a warmer-than-normal winter, particularly in the north. (Zeke Hausfather)

And while it will be warmer than average, that doesn’t mean that we won’t experience cold days, even days that are colder than normal or days with snowstorms.

Hausfather says most of north central Canada is going to be two degrees warmer than normal. “So you’re still going to have a lot of variation day to day and week to week,” he said. “Weather isn’t going away.”