Updated November 9, 2026, 6:12 p.m. ET
ORLANDO, FL — If you’re not sure where the potentially record-breaking El Niño is currently, you’re not alone.
Even though you’ve been hearing about the weather pattern along the equator since spring, its full impacts on the country’s climate are being felt more gradually. It’s not like a bright light suddenly turns on to announce his arrival.
Significant El Niño impacts have been observed in the Pacific and Atlantic Oceans, but the continental United States has not yet experienced direct climate impacts. These should arrive in the coming weeks, meteorologists told USA TODAY.
California experienced the impacts of El Niño on the coast, including sea level rise associated with Kelvin waves, a rare tropical storm warning, warm waters and a parade of unusual tropical marine life offshore. But the rest of the country is still waiting to see what a strong or very strong El Niño might mean in terms of rainy and severe weather.
Neither the catastrophic flooding in the Four Corners region nor the two feet of rain that fell in Florida during the first two days of November are direct impacts of El Niño, said Lindsay Long, a National Weather Service meteorologist who serves on the agency’s seasonal forecast teams.
“We can’t really attribute the current weather conditions to the strengthening of El Niño yet,” Long told USA TODAY on Nov. 2. “We haven’t really seen the connection yet.”
This should start to change soon. Meteorologists say some of the typical effects of El Niño could appear in parts of the continental United States over the next week.
What can we expect from El Niño and when?
In the latest climate outlook for November, released October 31, the Climate Prediction Center reduced the odds of an El Niño-driven atmospheric response in early November in the Southeast. The center now expects a more typical response to El Niño by the end of November.
This generally means an increased chance of precipitation in California, the South and especially Florida. Over California, a strong El Niño could produce a conveyor belt of intense atmospheric rivers during the winter. In Florida, El Niño tends to cause more frequent violent storms and tornadoes.
These effects typically begin to occur when the subtropical jet stream over the United States begins to extend farther south and east, with strong air coming in from the west, Long said.
In California and along the Pacific Coast, this shift toward wetter, El Niño-like influences could begin within the next week, with increased risks from atmospheric rivers, Long said.
The biggest impacts of El Niño might not arrive in California until later in December or January, and wait until El Niño intensity is forecast to peak in December or January, said Daniel Swain, a climatologist at the University of California Agriculture and Natural Resources.
To prepare for what is likely to be a very wet and stormy winter in the southern United States, local weather service offices have been meeting with local emergency management officials.
“This winter is going to be a lot different than last winter,” Will Ulrich, warning coordination meteorologist for the weather service in Melbourne, Fla., told a packed room of emergency officials in Orlando in late October.
“Since 1950, approximately 70% of El Niño winters have been associated with wetter than normal conditions in central Florida.” The correlation is even higher when looking only at severe El Niño events, he said. These past El Niño events have caused some of the worst tornado outbreaks and flooding in the state.
A similar briefing for emergency managers in Southern California emphasized that El Niño is not a storm itself and does not indicate the timing, path or intensity of weather systems. “This leads the way,” said Todd Hall, warning coordination meteorologist for the Los Angeles Weather Service.
In areas facing higher than normal risks from a wet winter, “preparation is key,” the weather service said.
Climatologists and meteorologists warn that there is no guarantee that this El Niño will be like past El Niños, although it is predicted to be a powerful event.
El Niño and weather events to study later
It’s possible that additional analysis later could find indications of El Niño in the most recent weather conditions, Long said. Afterward, scientists will examine the extent to which rain in the Four Corners region might have been amplified by warm temperatures due to climate change or warmer sea surface temperatures.
The two floods – in the Four Corners and Florida – are most likely more extreme because of warmer ocean temperatures in general, and are not specifically linked to El Niño, said Nathan Lenssen, a scientist at the National Center for Atmospheric Research and an assistant professor at the Colorado School of Mines.
In Florida, for example, the oceans on both sides of the state are much warmer than normal, Lenssen said. “These warmer temperatures make these events more extreme.”
“For all the storms we experience in North America, all El Niño can do is stack the deck. It can make one type of event more likely, or more likely to occur in a different location at a slightly higher rate,” Lenssen said. “It doesn’t directly cause any individual event.”
Many areas of the world’s oceans — under the influence of El Niño and climate change — are warmer than they have ever been this time of year, Swain told listeners during his Nov. 6 “Weather West” podcast. “It’s amazing, and not in a good way.”
El Niño impacts on oceans arrived months ago, bringing unusual marine life
El Niño is part of a three-phase natural climate cycle that also includes La Niña and a neutral phase. The first signals of this El Niño phase began earlier this year when a pool of warm water moved eastward into the Pacific along the equator.
Sea surface temperatures have risen dramatically in the eastern and central Pacific and have set daily records for months. This influence on the oceans and tropics caused a flurry of tropical activity in the Hawaiian Islands and eastern Pacific during the summer.
El Niño’s connection with the Pacific atmosphere also caused strong shear winds in the Atlantic Ocean, which helped limit activity during the 2026 Atlantic hurricane season.
Changes in sea surface temperatures in the Pacific tend to send some tropical marine life north along the Pacific coast in search of food. Sightings so far this year include red-footed boobies, a seabird typically found much further south, warm-water sharks such as hammerheads and whale sharks, and even venomous yellow sea snakes.
“We are seeing remarkable changes in marine life along the Pacific Coast, including species appearing in places where they are not typically found,” said Jeni Smith, curator and rescue supervisor at SeaWorld San Diego.
“Seabirds can be a harbinger of what’s happening below the surface,” Smith said. “Our rescue team has responded to a significant increase in the number of sea and shorebirds, many of which are arriving severely underweight and struggling to find food.”
During the year 2025, the team rescued 408 birds, and already this year they have assisted in 488 rescues, she said. “We are also seeing particularly worrying numbers of common murres arriving emaciated, which tells us that these animals are struggling to find the food they need to survive.”
Dinah Voyles Pulver covers climate change, weather and environmental issues for USA TODAY, topics she has covered for more than 30 years. Contact her at dpulver@usatoday.com.
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