Note to readers • This story is made possible through a partnership between The Salt Lake Tribune and Grist, a nonprofit environmental media organization.

A monster is growing in the Pacific — not the kraken, but something far scarier.

El Niño is a natural phenomenon in which a band of warm water forms every three to five years off the coast of South America. It raises ocean water temperatures by just a few extra degrees for nine to 12 months, sure enough, but ends up injecting an extraordinary amount of energy into the sky. It’s already the strongest El Niño on record, and it might not even peak for another couple of months.

“Those are actually really big changes for the ocean,” Art Miller, a climate scientist at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography, told Grist in September. “The ocean has a lot of heat content — 1,000 times more ability to hold heat than the atmosphere — so slight changes in the ocean surface temperatures can actually do a lot for the atmosphere.”

While scientists are still trying to figure out how climate change might be influencing El Niño, some research suggests that rising temperatures have led to stronger El Niño events. At the very least, we can use this event’s temporarily warming to imagine what the climate will look like by default in two decades, as planetary temperatures continue to rise.

The atmospheric changes are so complex, in fact, that different parts of the United States will endure vastly different impacts from El Niño. California, for example, typically sees increased rainfall and flooding. The Midwest might be relatively better off with a milder, drier winter, whereas the Southwest is already seeing extreme flooding. There’s also a lot of uncertainty here: Models can predict general changes across regions, but no one can tell you what the weather will be in a given spot a month from now.

What the forecast says for Utah and the Southwest

States in the Mountain West are carefully monitoring the El Niño forecast, especially after enduring a dismal winter and unprecedented heat waves over the last year.

“We are optimistic that from a drought point of view, from a water resources point of view, benefits will be had,” said Jon Meyer, assistant state climatologist at the Utah Climate Center.

Ski resorts in Utah and Colorado took a pummeling as they struggled to keep slopes open last winter and spring.

“Areas in the high country where we expected to ski were in 60s, if not 70s,” said Peter Goble, assistant state climatologist at the Colorado Climate Center. “Our snowpack, one of the worst on record, very quickly disappeared in the second half of March, which is highly unusual.”

But the brutal winter didn’t just disrupt skiers and snowboarders. Snowfall also serves as an important component of the region’s water supplies — reservoirs and pipelines are designed to capture snowmelt in the spring and deliver it to cities, farms and businesses during the hot summer months. In 2026, that largely didn’t happen.

Much of Utah saw normal levels of precipitation during the season, Meyer noted, but it came as rain instead of snow.

“It fell in a very different form than we’re used to,” he said. “That presented a very different hydrological scenario.”

The region is in dire need of snowpack in the months ahead. Utah’s Great Salt Lake hovers just a few inches above eclipsing the record-low elevation it set in 2022, and its vast exposed lakebed is drying into a dust source impacting the health of roughly 2.5 million residents living in cities near its shore.

Meanwhile, Lake Mead and Lake Powell, the nation’s largest reservoirs, saw a fraction of their normal inflows from the Colorado River and set their own record lows over the fall. Around 40 million people in the West depend on water supplies delivered by the Colorado River system.

El Niño often delivers rain and snow to the Southwest and could bring a glimmer of hope to a region suffering historic drought. Meyer expects that weather pattern to bring “favorable storm activity” to the desert Southwest in California, Arizona and New Mexico, bleeding into Nevada, and parts of southern Utah and southern Colorado.

But northern Utah, which is home to most of the state’s population, “is right in the bulls-eye of being very unpredictable,” Meyer said. “When we look back at Utah’s top winters, we’ve never had a great winter when the Pacific is in the current conditions we have right now.”

Colorado’s outlook is also mixed under El Niño conditions. Those years tend to bring more precipitation in the shoulder seasons — spring and fall. But it also typically creates drier conditions for the northern Rockies, Goble said.

“The strong El Niño, as interesting a story as it’s been,” he said, “doesn’t guarantee us anything.”

The early-autumn run-up to the Super El Niño has already drenched the desert, sending torrents through Las Vegas city streets and remote arroyos in western New Mexico. Arizona now faces tornadoes, flash flooding and other extreme weather, according to AccuWeather meteorologists.

Widespread flooding in southern Utah has already damaged nearly 100 homes.

More moisture would boost desiccated reservoirs and reduce sleepless nights for farmers. Lake Powell rose about 7 feet in October due to heavy rain. Experts, however, are already repeating an all-too-familiar warning: one good year won’t solve the region’s water woes.

It was only a few years ago, in 2023, that Western states like Utah saw their biggest snow years on record. Today, that moisture is gone, and both the Rio Grande and Colorado River basins look more stressed than ever. Climatologists say those extreme oscillations are likely to become more common as the region cooks under climate change.

“The global temperature time series actually kind of looks a little bit like a stair-step pattern,” Goble said. Heat spikes during El Niño events, then drops back down when La Niña rolls in.

But in recent years, “it doesn’t really come down again the way you would expect it to,” he said.

The trend of mountain snowpacks melting out earlier and earlier is another trend scientists have observed over decades. This year saw the most egregious example of drought, which also brought extreme fire conditions to the West. But abnormally wet years bring their own headaches, as communities grapple with flooding.

“Water resource management is facing increased risk,” Meyer said. “The whiplash we might get from extreme wet to extreme dry is something that’s been predicted.”

Read more about how climatologists and forecasters expect super El Niño will impact the rest of the country, from Alaska to the Midwest to Hawaii, at Grist.org.