A VERY STRONG EL NIÑO IS TAKING SHAPE. HERE’S WHAT BC RIDERS SHOULD KNOW.
NOAA NOW PUTS THE ODDS ABOVE 90%. WE WENT BACK THROUGH DECADES OF BC SNOWPACK DATA TO FIND OUT WHAT THAT REALLY MEANS FOR THE SEASON AHEAD.
Photo: JS Media House
If checking the long-range forecast counts as preseason training, we’re officially underway. El Niño is strengthening in the tropical Pacific, and this one is shaping up to be an unusually strong event. NOAA’s September 10 outlook puts the chance of a very strong El Niño through fall and winter 2026–27 at greater than 90 percent. It goes further: there is now a 75 percent chance that the October–December event reaches a magnitude that would exceed previous El Niños in its record dating to 1950.
So, what exactly does that mean for snowmobiling in BC?
El Niño develops when unusually warm water in the tropical Pacific changes atmospheric circulation and weather patterns thousands of kilometres away. In western Canada, El Niño winters tend to be warmer, and southern BC has generally recorded less snowfall. But the relationship with total precipitation is much weaker.
In other words, El Niño doesn’t necessarily turn off the Pacific moisture tap. Temperature, freezing level, storm track and whether that precipitation falls as rain or snow all matter. And once that broad Pacific signal runs into BC’s mountains, the historical record gets considerably more interesting.
So we went looking at the receipts.
In southeast BC, more than four decades of snow-pillow data for Fernie show that El Niño hasn’t consistently meant a low-snow winter. Some El Niño winters finished below normal, others near it and several above it. Even the exceptionally strong 1997–98 event finished around the end of March remarkably close to normal.
In Revelstoke, the numbers are even more interesting. During the strong 2015–16 El Niño, snowpack reached roughly 1,288 mm SWE - about 107 percent of normal. The 2006–07 El Niño climbed to roughly 1,490 mm, around 124 percent. And during the exceptionally strong 1997–98 event, snowpack was well above normal.
Whistler gives us another way to look at it. Here, we pulled historical snowfall records from the Roundhouse at Whistler Blackcomb rather than snow-pillow SWE. During the exceptionally strong 1997–98 El Niño, the Roundhouse recorded roughly 753 cm of snow from December through February alone. And just like Fernie and Revelstoke, the broader record shows El Niño winters landing on both sides of normal.
There are lean El Niño winters in these records too. And that’s exactly the point: El Niño shifts the odds. It doesn’t dictate the outcome.
None of this tells us how many deep days BC will get this winter. Seasonal snowpack can hide plenty of feast and famine, and a below-normal winter can still deliver an exceptional storm cycle. Deep days are made one storm at a time.
So, should riders be worried? The historical record doesn’t support writing off the season based on El Niño alone. As winter gets underway, one number will be particularly worth watching: the freezing level. Pacific moisture can still arrive in abundance, and when colder air lines up with those incoming storms, there’s plenty of opportunity for deep snow to stack up across BC.
That’s what we’ll be watching this winter.
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