Does El Niño Mean More Snow? What 56 Winters of Data Say for Your City

El Niño Snowfall by City: Biggest Losers to Biggest Gainers

Mean DJF (Dec–Feb) snowfall at each city's primary NOAA station, comparing all winters 1971–2026 against the eight strong El Niño winters since 1970. Negative means El Niño winters ran drier than normal; positive means snowier. Ranked driest-relative to snowiest-relative.

Snowfall is NOAA GHCN-Daily, measured at the airport ASOS in nearly every case (New York uses the long-running Central Park record, Denver the continuous Stapleton record). Each El Niño average uses seven or eight winters, depending on data completeness. Southern cities carry small totals, so a big percent swing can be an inch or two — read their raw inches alongside the percentage. You can pull the daily snow record for any of these on our city pages, e.g. Chicago or Denver.

The Northern Snow Belt Loses — and It's Not Close

Fifteen of our 30 cities averaged at least 13% less DJF snow in strong El Niño winters, and almost every one of them sits across the northern half of the country. The mechanism is the part people miss when they assume “big El Niño = big winter.” A strong El Niño warms the eastern tropical Pacific, which reliably lifts the polar jet stream north and keeps it there. That does two things to the north: it bottles up the Arctic air behind the jet instead of unloading it into the Lower 48, and it cuts down on the fast-moving “clipper” systems that drop quick several-inch snows across the Midwest and Great Lakes. NOAA's Climate Prediction Center describes the same setup in its ENSO monitoring materials.

Lake-effect cities take the clearest hit, because lake-effect snow needs repeated blasts of cold air crossing still-warm water. Fewer cold outbreaks means fewer lake-effect events, which is why Buffalo (−33%) and Cleveland (−24%) fall so far below normal despite being the snowiest big cities in the East. Interior cities tell the same story a little more quietly: Detroit −24%, Milwaukee, Columbus and Fargo all around −19%, Minneapolis −13%, Chicago −11%. The two biggest losers, Indianapolis (−51%) and St. Louis (−34%), sit at the southern edge of the reliable snow zone, where a milder El Niño pattern tips a lot of would-be snow over to cold rain.

Where El Niño Actually Makes Snow: the Mid-Atlantic

Flip the map south of the Mason-Dixon line and the sign flips with it. The same jet-stream shift that starves the Great Lakes supercharges the southern, sub-tropical branch of the jet — the one that spins up coastal “Miller A” storms off the Carolinas and runs them up the East Coast. When those storms meet just enough cold air over the Mid-Atlantic, they bury it.

This is the data behind a fact every DC-area snow-weenie already knows in their bones: the region's monster winters skew El Niño. The 2009-10 “Snowmageddon” winter, which buried Washington and Baltimore under back-to-back blockbusters, was a strong El Niño. So was the record 2015-16 winter that produced the January blizzard “Jonas.” Our numbers put Washington 38% above normal and Richmond 37% above across the strong El Niño set — the clearest positive signal of any region in the country.

The Southern Tier Is a Wildcard, Not a Jackpot

Dallas (+63%), Atlanta (+59%) and Oklahoma City (+35%) top the percentage gains, and it's tempting to read that as “the South gets hammered in El Niño.” Don't. These are tiny baselines: Dallas's “63% more” is the difference between averaging 1.9 inches a winter and 3.1. What's real is that the active southern storm track gives the Sun Belt more chances at a rare snow or ice event — the kind that shuts down a city that owns almost no plows. An El Niño winter is when Dallas or Atlanta is most likely to get its once-in-a-few-years snowstorm, even though the seasonal total stays small. Raleigh is the odd one out at −18%; its few El Niño winters in the record happened to run warm, a reminder that small samples on small totals are noisy.

One Winter Can Blow Up the Average

Everything above is an average over seven or eight winters, and that smoothing hides how wild the spread is. Chicago is the cleanest example: it averages 11% below normal in El Niño, but its eight El Niño winters ranged from a measly 7.2 inches in 1997-98 to a buried 52.4 inches in 2009-10 — one of its snowier modern winters, inside a strong El Niño. El Niño strength matters too. The very-strong years (1982-83, 1997-98, 2015-16, 2023-24) tend to show the pattern most sharply; weaker ones are muddier. The takeaway isn't “El Niño guarantees a dry winter in the north.” It's that over many winters, the odds tilt the way the table shows — and the cold air still has to show up at the right time for any of it to fall as snow.

What the 2026-27 Super El Niño Means

This isn't a normal El Niño. NOAA's Climate Prediction Center put the odds of a historic-strength (very strong) event this winter above 83% in its October 8 outlook — a Super El Niño in the class of 1997-98 and 2015-16. If 2026-27 tracks the strong-El-Niño pattern in this table, the lean is: a milder, lower-snow winter for the Great Lakes and Upper Midwest, an active and potentially big-snow season for the Mid-Atlantic from Richmond through Washington to Philadelphia, and elevated odds of a disruptive one-off snow or ice event across the South. For the temperature-and-precipitation side of the same forecast, see our Super El Niño winter outlook for 21 cities, and for where the Pacific actually stands right now, our El Niño 2026 tracker.

Check Your Own City — and Tell Us How This Winter Goes

If your city isn't in the table, you can reconstruct its El Niño snow history yourself. Use our weather-on-this-day lookup to pull the snow on any past date, and watch this winter's snow records land in near-real time on our records-broken tracker. We'll be back in spring 2027 to grade this forecast against what actually fell — if your city busts the pattern, that's the number we want to hear about. For how much snow these cities get in a normal year, see the snowiest cities in America, and for when that snow usually starts, when it starts snowing by city. It all ties back to the US weather records hub.

Frequently Asked Questions

Sources & Method

Snowfall: NOAA GHCN-Daily via our database (1970–present). For each city we totaled December–February snowfall at its primary long-record station (winter labeled by its January year; snow converted from millimetres to inches; days flagged as bad SNOW readings excluded; a winter must report at least 80 of its ~90 DJF days to count), then compared the mean across all qualifying winters 1971–2026 with the mean across the strong and very-strong El Niño winters since 1970. El Niño winters and their strength (Strong ≥ 1.5, Very Strong ≥ 2.0 peak) are from NOAA's Climate Prediction Center Oceanic Niño Index as compiled at ggweather.com/enso/oni.htm: 1972-73, 1982-83, 1987-88, 1991-92, 1997-98, 2009-10, 2015-16 and 2023-24. The 2026-27 strength outlook is from the NOAA CPC ENSO Diagnostic Discussion. This is a station-level analysis, not a full metro average, and small-total southern cities carry more year-to-year noise. See our data sources & methodology page. Data verified October 17, 2026.