Winter 2026-27 · California, Oregon, Washington Loading NOAA status Data as of—

West Coast El Niño Watch

One of the strongest El Niños on record is building in the Pacific, and it will not hit the coast evenly. Start with your address to see your home's flood, coastal, slide and storm risk this winter, plus its wildfire risk before the rains and next summer, then follow the global signals behind it, refreshed every week.

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Street-level detail around Palo Alto. Elsewhere in CA, OR and WA the check starts from your city, county, neighborhood or ZIP code; tap the map to move the pin to your exact spot

—Each band is one week of central Pacific sea-surface temperature anomaly (Niño-3.4). Blue is cooler than normal, red warmer—

Your address this winter

Screens one location for winter hazards, scales them by what NOAA expects for that part of the coast, and rates wildfire on its own. It is not a FEMA flood determination or an official fire zone lookup

Results appear here

Drag to move the map, + and - to zoom, tap to check any spot

Your prep plan

A dated checklist built from the hazards at your address. Ticks are saved in this browser only

Your checklist appears here after an address check

This winter's signal

One number for how strongly the global drivers point toward a big El Niño winter, plus the odds for the place you checked

Season Signal, 0-100

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WeakModerateStrongHighExtreme

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History of this number

Loading odds

Up and down the coast

El Niño usually soaks California and leaves the Pacific Northwest milder and often drier. NOAA's current outlook, city by city

NOAA outlook, Jan-Mar 2027 precipitation

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City	Dec-Feb rain	Jan-Mar rain	Jan-Mar temp	Past strong El Niños	Rain since Oct 1

Wildfire before the rains and after El Niño

El Niño shifts when fire risk peaks more than it removes it. What to expect this fall, this winter and next summer

NIFC fire potential outlook

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Now until the first soaking rainFall is still fire seasonOctober and November bring the dry offshore winds, Diablo in the north and Santa Ana in the south, behind many of California's most destructive fires. El Niño does nothing to stop them before the rain starts. NIFC rates fire potential for the coast month by month; the map updates on the 1st of each month

December to MarchRain usually shuts it down, with one exceptionSteady storms lower fire risk across most of California. The exception is a long dry spell with strong offshore winds. Los Angeles burned in January 2025 after two wet winters grew the brush and the next winter started near-record dry, the "hydroclimate whiplash" described by Swain et al. (2025)

Spring to fall 2027More grass in California, maybe a longer season up northIn California's grassy foothills and valleys, a wet year has meant more area burned the next year, because the extra grass dries into fuel (Keeley and Syphard 2017). Conifer forests usually burn less after a wet winter. In Oregon and Washington, El Niño often brings a warmer winter with less snow, and early melt lengthens the fire season (Westerling et al. 2006). Inland Northwest fire years came more often when El Niño and a warm PDO lined up (Heyerdahl et al. 2008); this year the PDO is strongly negative, which works against that

2027 fire lean by landscape, if the winter plays out as forecast

California grass, brush and oak foothillsLeans higherExtra grass from a wet winter dries into fuel by summer (Keeley and Syphard 2017; Swain et al. 2025)

California conifer forests (Sierra, North Coast ranges)Leans lowerForests burn less in wet years and more in dry ones (Keeley and Syphard 2017)

Inland Oregon and Washington forestsLeans higherWarm, low-snow springs bring bigger fire years; El Niño raised early-summer fire potential in the Northwest (Westerling et al. 2006; Heyerdahl et al. 2008; Mason et al. 2017). The negative PDO tempers this

What's driving it

Each global factor, its latest reading, and whether the last update pushed the risk up, down or left it steady

Factor	Latest	Since last update	Effect on risk	Weight	Trend
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Live pulse: weekly Pacific temperatures

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Global signal, local impact

These signals are global. What do they mean for your street?

Conditions near you

For the place you checked: rain so far, the nearest king tides, rivers and burn scars

River, coast or burn scar nearby?

Calm creeks and quiet tides now can change fast. Check how close your home sits to each

How past strong El Niños went along the coast

Water-year rain (Oct-Sep) as a share of normal at NOAA stations, for every El Niño as strong as this one is forecast to be

Drier than normalNear normalWetter than normal

Wet does not always mean damagingCalifornia's 1997-98 El Niño brought roughly double the normal rain, yet the non-El Niño winter before it caused about three times the flood damage. Storm timing, not the season total, drove the losses (Jan Null, Golden Gate Weather Services).

2015-16 is the warning caseThe last "super" El Niño left Southern California drier than normal and the Northwest wetter, the reverse of the textbook pattern. One strong event is never a guarantee.

The coast takes a beating either wayThe 2015-16 El Niño drove record winter erosion along much of the US West Coast as waves ran higher and from a more southerly direction (Barnard et al., Nature Communications, 2017).

Before the first big storm

Past El Niños flooded some neighborhoods and spared others a few miles away. See where your address stands

How this works

Every input is public data. The weights are a judgment call and are shown so you can disagree with them

Season Signal

Each global factor in the ledger is scaled from 0 (no push toward a big El Niño winter) to 1 (full push), then multiplied by its weight. The weights add to 100. The Pacific Decadal Oscillation counts as a brake because a strongly negative PDO has muted El Niño's effect on the West Coast before.

The signal is recomputed for every monthly update, which is what the history chart and the trend arrows compare. It is a summary of evidence, not a probability.

Address check

Around Palo Alto: street-level matching against OpenStreetMap, FEMA flood zones at the point, distance to creeks and the Bay, and USGS terrain for elevation and slope.
Elsewhere in CA, OR and WA: your ZIP code or city center, or any point you tap, matched to the nearest census tract in FEMA's National Risk Index (December 2025 release). Each hazard score comes from the tract's expected annual building-loss rate (expected losses as a share of building value, so dense downtowns and farmland do not skew it), placed on a 0-100 log scale where 100 is about the top 1% of West Coast tracts.
Burn scars: wildfires of 1,000+ acres from 2024 to 2026 (NIFC). Living inside or just below one raises the debris-flow score.
Wildfire: scored on its own and left out of the winter score. The base is the tract's FEMA expected annual building-loss rate from wildfire on the same 0-100 log scale (0 at 0.001% of building value per year, 100 at 0.5%). In California, a CAL FIRE Fire Hazard Severity Zone at the point sets a floor: Very High 75, High 55, Moderate 35. Zone boundaries are simplified to about 150 m, so near an edge check CAL FIRE's own map. NIFC's monthly outlook covers the next four months, and the 2027 lean comes from NOAA's outlook at the spot plus published fire-climate research. Outside California the score rests on FEMA's index; Oregon repealed its statewide hazard map in 2025.
This winter: each score is multiplied by a local factor from NOAA's Dec-Feb and Jan-Mar precipitation outlook at your location and the Season Signal. It ranges from 0.75 where NOAA leans dry to 1.5 where it leans strongly wet.

Areas behind levees, such as much of Sacramento and the Delta, can score low because FEMA's index credits the levees; a levee failure would still flood them, so check DWR's Best Available Maps and your levee district. For anything that affects insurance, construction or an evacuation decision, use FEMA's official flood map and your county's emergency information.

Sources and references

Every figure on this page traces to one of these. Links checked Oct 11, 2026

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