A view over California in June 2026.

After months of anticipation, the National Weather Service’s Climate Prediction Center declared on Thursday that El Niño conditions have developed. 

The latest data shows a 63% chance that El Niño, the seasonal climate pattern that generally brings a wet winter to California along with a cascade of global weather impacts, will become “very strong” from November 2026 through January 2027.

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California experts are closely monitoring the potency of this El Niño, which some models show as on par with the previous seven very strong events since 1950 and others forecast will make history by the end of the year. 

“El Niño kept brewing, and now the telltale signs have become strong signals,” Alexander Gershunov, a research meteorologist at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography at UC San Diego, told SFGATE. “All the models basically came into agreement to predict El Niño, and most of them are predicting a very strong El Niño.”

FILE: Commuters navigate the rain in San Francisco.

El Niño is the warm phase of a pattern that develops in the tropical Pacific........

© SFGate