Surf to Snow
What this El Niño Means for Mountain Snow and Ocean Waves
October 1, 2026 — As we enter the waning months of 2026, all eyes are on El Niño.
For our partners at the Surfrider Foundation, changing ocean conditions are part of a much larger story playing out along our coasts. Communities are experiencing stronger storms and swells, rising seas, damaged infrastructure and property, and the loss of beaches and other coastal ecosystems.
For Winter Wildlands Alliance, changes in weather and temperature are being felt hundreds of miles inland, where the difference between rain and snow can have implications for recreation, wildlife, watersheds, and communities.
Our work may start in different landscapes—Surfrider at the coast and Winter Wildlands Alliance in the mountains—but the forces shaping these places are deeply connected.
The ocean and the mountains are part of the same system. What happens in the Pacific shapes the snow that falls this winter, even hundreds of miles from the coastline.
This year’s El Niño and a super marine heatwave in the eastern Pacific offer a powerful example of just how closely those systems are linked.
Scientists have been watching warming waters in the equatorial Pacific and the development of El Niño for months, along with an abnormally warm blob of water off the North American west coast. Extreme ocean temps, breaking 80 degrees off the coast of southern California, can shift weather patterns across North America, changing where storms travel, where precipitation falls, and ultimately what our snowpack looks like.
What is a strong El Niño?
First off, in quick review, El Niño describes the global weather pattern that follows when ocean temps in the equatorial Pacific are warmer than average (0.5°C increase). These events occur every few years, when equatorial trade winds slack or reverse, sending a bulge of warm water west. This is the opposite of La Niña which happens when ocean temps are cooler than average. During a typical El Niño winter in North America, the Pacific jet stream blasts westward across the southern United States bringing above average precipitation, while the northern United States is drier and warmer than average.
“El Niño is coming, and coming in strong!!”
– Ron Abramovich, WWA Board Member and retired snow scientist
A “super El Niño” is an unofficial, yet widely used term for an unusually strong El Niño event. Meteorologists generally use this label when sea surface temperatures in the equatorial Pacific Ocean rise to 2°C or more above the long-term average. These events are much rarer and are associated with extreme weather and, yes, snow. Ocean temps are projected to tip 2.5 C this fall.
But what does this mean for winter 2026/27?
Looking to Past El Niño winters for clues
Winter Wildlands Alliance board member and retired snow scientist Ron Abramovich has spent decades studying the relationship between weather and snow. One of the tools he uses is surprisingly simple: looking backward to understand what might happen next.
Ron tracks Pacific Ocean temperatures over time to identify analog years—past years with similar ocean patterns that can offer clues about the winter ahead.
In 2025 this forecast strategy proved wildly accurate in terms of the snowpack, but last winter, due to the warm temperatures, not so much.
Still the Earth’s oceans drive our weather, so studying its trends is one of the best clues we have for what’s to come. It’s important to note that analog years change as ocean temps fluctuate, so while in June we were talking about 1983,1998 and 2016. In September Ron posted that the best matches are 1973, 1983, and 2024.
To hear more from Ron about these analog years, check out his recent radio interview.
There’s another important part of this story, though. A wetter winter doesn’t necessarily mean a snowier winter. Temperature matters. Warmer storms can mean more precipitation falls as rain instead of snow, particularly at lower elevations. Ron saw that challenge in recent forecasting: ocean patterns provided useful clues about precipitation, but warm temperatures complicated what ultimately happened to snowpack.
And that’s where this story becomes about much more than powder days.
Snowpack to Water Supply
One place that stands out across Ron’s analog years is the Tahoe region. That’s the home of our longtime WWA SnowSchool site at Sierra Watershed Education Partnerships. Here, local students become environmental stewards through connecting to the natural world. Through their SnowSchool experience, students explore firsthand the connection between mountain snow and their local water supply, and then later these students develop projects around water conservation, water quality, and restoration.
“El Niño provides a unique opportunity for students in the Tahoe region to truly engage in the connections between temperature, weather, snow pack and our water resources. Past El Niño in our region have produced very different outcomes. We are expecting a wetter than normal winter, but whether that falls as snow or rain will depend on the storm tract and temperatures. Fingers crossed we get some cold arctic air to turn this El Niño’s predicted atmospheric rivers into a deep long lasting snow pack.”
– Ashley Ewenson Phillips, Project Director, SWEP
What students are learning through SnowSchool in the mountains is part of a much bigger story. Snowpack doesn’t exist in isolation, it feeds watersheds, supports ecosystems and communities, and connects mountain landscapes to everything downstream. And just as healthy natural systems matter in the mountains, they matter at the coast.
From surf to snow, nature is part of the solution
Surfrider’s Climate Action Program focuses in part on nature-based solutions, working with natural coastal systems to help communities respond to climate impacts.
The same idea applies upstream.
In the mountains, intact forests and healthy watersheds are part of the natural infrastructure surrounding our snowpack and waterways. For Winter Wildlands Alliance, protecting these landscapes is central to protecting the places where people ski, snowboard and snowshoe—and the ecosystems and communities that depend on them.
That’s one reason Winter Wildlands Alliance is currently working to defend the Roadless Rule and the forests it protects.
From coastal ecosystems to mountain forests, these landscapes may look completely different, but they’re connected by the same water cycle and by the same need to protect healthy, resilient natural systems.
The Pacific influences the storms above our mountains. Those storms build our snowpack. That snow becomes the water flowing through our watersheds. And those rivers eventually lead us back toward the coast.
So this winter, when you look at the snow beneath your skis remember: its story may have started thousands of miles away in the Pacific.
