San Diego has put every city department into an El Niño working group as forecasters watch a very strong system build over the Pacific this winter. Assistant Fire Chief Robert Rezende is leading the planning, with crews focusing on the creeks, rivers and lakes that can turn dangerous fast if a major storm hits.
Rezende said the city is looking closely at San Ysidro, Sorrento Valley and Lake Hodges, where flood-prone channels and reservoirs could be tested by the wrong kind of storm. His warning is simple: prepare now for an extreme weather event, because the next heavy rain could arrive fast and leave little room to catch up.
That urgency explains why people are searching for Super El Niño snowfall predictions now. Tyler Rodenbaugh said scientists call an El Niño event when sea surface temperatures rise one-half degree Celsius above normal, and they call it a very strong El Niño at 1.5 degrees above normal. That is what they are seeing now, which is enough to shift expectations across Southern California before winter storms begin to form.
Dan Cayan said large El Niños tend to tilt the odds toward more winter north Pacific storms and larger ones because of the energy passed from the ocean to the atmosphere. In San Diego, the strongest comparisons still come from 1982-83 and 1997-98, when Lindbergh Field recorded nearly 20 inches of rain, far above the usual 10 inches, and 1982-83 brought 70 wet days instead of the normal 40 to 45.
But the pattern is not as reliable as it once looked. Cayan said the connection between ocean conditions and rainfall has weakened this century, and the Godzilla El Niño of 2015-16 ended up slightly drier, with Lindbergh Field recording 8 inches. That is why a winter that starts with a super El Niño can still produce a result that looks ordinary, or even fall short of it.
Alexander Gershunov said what actually happens will depend on specific atmospheric rivers, the long, narrow bands of air that carry tropical moisture and can trigger extreme rainfall. Those storms, not the label on the Pacific, will decide whether San Diego gets flooding, a quiet winter or a mix of both, while the city also keeps an eye on aging stormwater systems and century-old dams. The best read on this winter is not that El Niño guarantees disaster or relief, but that San Diego is bracing for either and waiting on the storms that matter most.
