The 2026 El Niño event has reached the strongest level on record by almost any metric as of mid-October, and it is still strengthening. The rise matters now because the event has already been linked to record coastal heat, higher ocean water levels, and damaging erosion and flooding in California.
That is why the El Niño Winter Drought Forecast is drawing attention now: the pattern is not just strong, it is still moving higher as the season turns toward winter. California has already felt the effect in more ways than one, from record levels of near-shore water temperatures to late-summer coastal humidity and humid heat across most of SoCal.
The scale of the event can be understood in the way forecasters talk about it. Nino 3.4 SST, one of the core measures used to track El Niño, briefly leveled off during a very strong westerly wind burst, but that pause has not changed the bigger trend. The event is still on a strong upward path, and the current burst of westerly winds is expected to persist for the next 2+ weeks.
That is the friction inside the forecast. Even as the ocean signal has oscillated week to week, the broader forcing remains pointed in the same direction. The current wind burst may even reverse the usual tropical wind pattern for a time, which would add more energy to the event and push it toward an even higher peak in the coming weeks.
California has already lived through the early consequences. Since July, multiple tropical storms and hurricanes have at least indirectly affected central and southern parts of the state, while unusually elevated ocean water levels have helped drive increasingly significant coastal erosion and flooding. Those impacts give the forecast more weight than a simple climate update: this is a live event with damage already visible along the coast.
The bigger picture is that this was not a surprise built overnight. The event was signaled well before it matured, and the processes now feeding it, including westerly wind bursts and wind-evaporation feedback, have kept it locked into a strengthening phase. The unresolved question is not whether it remains strong. It is how much stronger it gets before it peaks, and whether the coming weeks turn an already historic El Niño into something even more extreme before winter fully arrives.
