Winter 2026/27 in Europe: what a record El Niño can and cannot tell us

A post by Frank Kaspar (Head of Climate and Data Analytics at EUMETSAT) caught my eye this week. It points to a new EUMETSAT use case that looks at more than 30 years of satellite climate records and asks how European weather behaved during the strongest El Niño events [1]. Their conclusion for the coming months: if this El Niño behaves like the six strongest since 1991, January to March 2027 is likely to be warmer and wetter than normal in Europe, in line with the ECMWF seasonal forecast. That is a big claim about a part of the world where El Niño is usually a weak player. So I went to the data myself: the ocean first, then 75 years of European winters, and finally the seasonal forecast that came out this month. 1. The ocean: an El Niño for the record books The Oceanic Niño Index since 1950, with the 1982/83, 1997/98 and 2015/16 peaks and the current value of +2.2 for July to September 2026 The Oceanic Niño Index (ONI) is the 3-month mean sea surface temperature anomaly in the…