More rain? How a ‘super El Niño’ might impact B.C. weather next year

We’ve already seen unseasonably warm temperatures and weather in Vancouver and B.C. this year, and now experts are predicting that the mild weather will continue into next year.

In fact, global temperatures in 2027 will likely hit a new record, beating the previous one set in 2024, according to Bill Merryfield, a research scientist with Environment and Climate Change Canada.

This is because we are gearing up for a “super El Niño.”

An El Niño is when the Pacific Ocean waters warm up along the equator and cause “hemispheric circulation patterns to change across much of the world,” said Merryfield. This includes changing the path of jet streams and results in warming up the seasonal climate of many regions across the world.

“El Niño tends to pour heat from what’s absorbed by the ocean into the atmosphere,” said Merryfield. “And this, along with its effects on cloudiness, has a warming effect on the planet as a whole, and this warming effect accumulates during the lifetime of an El Niño, so as you get into the year after an El Niño starts to develop, quite often that will push the global average temperatures for that year into record territory.”

The most recent El Niño in 2023 and 2024 (which caused the record-breaking heat in 2024) wasn’t nearly as big as what we are expecting this year.

“So I think it’s quite likely that global temperatures in 2027 will hit a new record, beating 2024.”

Further, this is happening “on top of the effects of climate change,” he said. With B.C.’s climate warming up between 1°C and 2°C since 1948, winters are getting milder on average.

“And then when you have an El Niño on top of that, it will push things toward having a really unusual mild winter.”

What impacts will we see?

In Canada — and especially in Western Canada — El Niños bring milder than usual temperatures into the winter and spring.

They start to develop in the late spring and early summer, then continue to build during the rest of the year and peak around December, Merryfield explained.

“The impacts on Canada generally set in right around the end of the year, so starting into the new year, and again lingering often right through the spring months.”

On the West Coast, where our temperatures are already quite warm in the winter months, this could mean we will get more rain than snow next winter.

“This can have a big impact on how much winter precipitation falls as rain compared to snow, and so these warmer-than-usual winter temperatures in Vancouver, for example, have most often resulted in there being little or no snow during the winter.”

Merryfield pointed out that an El Niño affected the 2010 Vancouver Olympics, as there was a low supply of snow on the North Shore Mountains for the games.

We can’t blame the hot summer weather on the El Niño

Even though this spring and summer have already seen a number of temperature records broken, it is most likely not because of the El Niño.

“El Niño doesn’t usually have too much effect on summer temperatures in Canada, maybe a little bit in B.C., because it tends to warm the waters off our coasts, but I think what we’ve been experiencing in the last few weeks probably has other causes, possibly just kind of random weather variability,” said Merryfield.