It’s the first week of November, and some people in Toronto are still walking around in sweaters and light jackets.
There is a “super” El Niño this year, according to David Phillips, a retired senior climatologist at Environment Canada, one of the strongest on record. Phillips said it has also been called “Godzilla El Niño,” though scientists prefer to say it is “very strong.”
Bill Merryfield, a research scientist at Environment Canada, said this year’s El Niño is stronger than anything seen in at least the past 100 years.
When the ocean warming in a key region of the Pacific exceeds 2 C, an El Niño is classified as very strong, and these “super” events have happened about every 10 to 20 years in recent decades. This year’s warming is already well over 3 C and may intensify further, he said.
Phillips said it is even approaching four degrees warmer than usual.
“I mean, in my business, I get excited by half a degree. Four degrees is like a different world, and so no wonder it’s supercharged, turbocharged,” he said.
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This year’s El Niño has been connected to heightened sea levels and coastal flooding concerns along parts of B.C., severe droughts in Southeast Asia, and record temperatures around the world. Even Toronto recently broke an 80-year-old temperature record in late October.
“We haven’t had a frost in Toronto. We should have had snow on the pumpkins,” Phillips said. “Where is the snow?”
The last strong El Niño to sweep through Ontario was three years ago, in 2023-24. Phillips said Toronto saw far less snow in the winter than it typically does, comparing it to weather more often seen on the west coast.
“It was more like Vancouver than Toronto, we had maybe 60 per cent of our snowfall,” he said. “We had five times more rain than snow, we had fog day after day, week after week. I mean, it wasn’t shirt sleeves and muscle shirt kind of weather, but it certainly was jacket and sweater kind of weather.”
In 2015-2016, when there was another strong El Niño, Merryfield said the average winter temperatures in Toronto were about two to three degrees above historical norms. He says the current seasonal forecasts favour similar conditions for Toronto this year too.
What about snow?
It’s harder to predict precipitation in the winter, Merryfield said, but milder winter temperatures could lead to more rain than snow. He also said snow that’s on the ground could melt earlier than usual.
How much snow falls will also depend on lake-effect snow, which Toronto and the areas surrounding the Great Lakes are prone to. Phillips said lake-effect snow usually stops once the lakes freeze over in late January or early February, but in an El Niño year they stay open longer.
“You end up with maybe less snow overall, but it’s spread out more over the season,” he said, rather than the huge dumps of late November, December, and January seen last year.
Merryfield said every El Niño winter is different, adding that nature could “always deal us a wild card” and hand us very cold days within a milder season.
“El Niño doesn’t blow every day, and there are going to be times where all of a sudden it stops blowing and you get the polar vortex that comes down and bites you in the butt,” Phillips said.
That also means there won’t be a clear sign that winter has arrived, Phillips said. Even if December starts cold, it won’t necessarily stay that way.
“All of a sudden you could say, ‘Well, it’s finally here. We got a white Christmas, and we’re gonna buy my ski pass.’ But no, because it’ll be back and forth and up and down, it’ll be like a yo-yo kind of thing where you can’t really trust the weather.”
