El Niño Is Very Strong, Forecasters Say — and North Texas Feels Its Punch After the New Year, Not This Month
"El nino" is one of the most-searched weather terms in America tonight, and the National Weather Service in Fort Worth has a precise local answer: a very strong El Niño runs through the winter, but November in North and Central Texas stays warm and slightly dry — the event's cooling, wetter signal historically arrives here later in the winter, and the Climate Prediction Center still gives this region a 60–70% chance of an above-normal-precipitation winter.
FORT WORTH — Start with what is not in dispute. "Very strong El Niño continues across the Equatorial Pacific and is expected through the upcoming winter," the National Weather Service's Fort Worth office wrote in its extended-range discussion, updated November 8 and read in full this run. The event's magnitude then likely decreases through the spring, with neutral conditions the most likely phase by early summer. NOAA's seasonal numbers, summarized by WiseVoter on November 10, project a very strong El Niño through December, roughly a 97% chance of a strong event lingering through February, and Texas rainfall 25% to 49% above average across the September-through-November season.
Then comes the local discipline, and it cuts against the headline instinct. For the rest of November, North and Central Texas favors above-normal temperatures and slightly below-normal precipitation, the Fort Worth office says — driven less by El Niño than by a strongly negative Pacific Decadal Oscillation (the PDO read -1.39 in October) and a positive Pacific-North American pattern. "Despite the strong El Niño, ENSO doesn't seem to historically have too much of an impact on North and Central Texas weather one way or the other until after the New Year," the discussion says. The El Niño cooling signal, it adds, "tends to be more pronounced later in the winter into early spring."
The winter as a whole is a different ledger from November. Taking the Climate Prediction Center's winter precipitation forecast at face value for Climate Division 61 — North and Central Texas — the Fort Worth office puts the chance of above-normal precipitation this winter at about 60 to 70%. Temperatures at the end of November into the holidays most likely run near to slightly above normal, with "maybe a couple strong shots of cold/arctic air from the north," and the office expects 2026 to finish as one of the three warmest years on record for both DFW and Waco.
So the honest Metroplex version of tonight's national search is a two-part sentence: the Pacific is running one of its strongest warm events, and its Texas winter is still coming — weighted toward a wetter season overall, arriving late, and sitting on top of the warmest kind of year this region records. November, meanwhile, belongs to the pattern already overhead: warm, mostly dry, and — as this morning's clear 64 degrees shows — in no hurry to change.
