After three months of desperately dry Colorado weather, there’s finally good news.
ENSO-neutral conditions are now present and favored from April-June (80% chance).
“From May-July 2026, El Niño is likely to emerge (61% chance) and persist through at least the end of 2026.” (El Niño/Southern Oscillation (ENSO) Diagnostic Discussion, Climate Prediction Center/NCEP/NWS, April 9) From January-March, 3.05 inches of precipitation fell in Ouray, 51% of normal, 5.98 inches. Snow accumulation was 59 inches, 69% of the normal 85.5 inches.
As of Tuesday, 1.92 inches of precipitation have fallen this month. That’s 77% of normal for April, normally the third wettest month of the year with 2.49 inches. Only 4.5 inches of snow fell, just 20% of normal, 22.6.
This shift from a very dry La Niña year is happening none too soon, especially for the San Juan mountain communities: By April 14, Ridgway and Log Hill Mesa were in moderate drought; Ouray, Durango, Dolores, Cortez, Mancos, Lake City and Creede in severe drought; Telluride, Ophir, Rico, Mountain Village, Placerville and Pagosa Springs in extreme drought; and Silverton in exceptional drought.
“As of April 21, 2026, approximately 98% (102,297 square miles) of Colorado is under drought conditions and 2% (1,797 square miles) is abnormally dry.” (Current Drought Conditions for Colorado – April 21, 2026, plantmaps.com).
But there’s hope on the near horizon: May begins tomorrow (Friday) with the first two weeks forecast warm and wet. No surprise on the warm, but the extended wet weather predicted in last Friday’s 3-4 week forecast (May 9-22) would allow even more relief for plants, animals and people. (May normals: highs 64.3 degrees, lows 37.5 degrees, precip 1.84 inches, snow 6.7 inches.)
Russ Schumacher, Colorado State climatologist and professor at Colorado State University, told The Colorado Sun that “the odds are increasingly good for a super El Niño later in 2026.” (Shannon Mullane, “A super El Niño is in the forecast. Here’s what that means for Colorado,” April 14) El Niño “tilts the odds toward things being wetter” in Colorado, said Schumacher.
Before an El Niño event, he said, “The outlooks are pointing towards the active monsoon season this summer, and so that’s probably the thing to keep a closer eye on in the near term.” It would be great news for southwestern Colorado as the monsoon, which normally provides 31% of Ouray’s water total for the year, was a non-starter the last two summers.
Still, Schumacher said, “Four months out it’s hard to put really high probabilities on anything.” He noted that good monsoon rains can’t really make up for the meager 2025-26 Colorado snowpack, though they will certainly help the forests, parks and homeowners’ gardens. The Gunnison River Basin, which includes the Uncompahgre River Watershed, sat at 12% of normal snow water equivalent (SWE) last Sunday and rose to 18% SWE as of Monday morning.
Since an El Niño event has increasingly good odds for fall and winter 2026, climate scientists are examining what effects it could have long term. “The Pacific heat pulse is temporary, but scientists warn that its climate impacts are not.” (Bob Berwyn, “The Next El Niño Could Lock Earth Into a Hotter Climate,” Inside Climate News, April 25) Scientists are watching the “giant climate cauldron” of the Pacific Ocean as it heats up for the next El Niño episode of ENSO (El Niño/Southern Oscillation). Berwyn reports that, “In a world already superheated by greenhouse gases, a strong El Niño during the next 12 to 18 months could permanently push the planet’s average annual temperature past the 1.5 degrees Celsius warming threshold … a turning point for potentially irreversible climate impacts.”
“Climate scientists also recently published a study showing that strong El Niño events can trigger what they called ‘climate regime shifts,’ meaning abrupt, lasting changes in heat, rainfall, and drought patterns.” Extra tropical ocean heat generated by greenhouse gas emissions and stored in the world’s oceans, particularly the Pacific, has to be released somewhere and “El Niño is one of the planet’s biggest natural release valves,” notes Berwyn.
During the super El Niño of 2015, “heat from the tropical Pacific helped raise the global annual average temperature irreversibly past 1 degree Celsius above the pre-industrial baseline.” Climate scientist James Hansen told Inside Climate News that “Even a moderately strong El Niño during the next 12 to 18 months could drive the average global temperature to about 1.7 degrees Celsius above the preindustrial level …” He does not see the world cooling “back down to the 1.5 Celsius mark after the El Niño fades.”
“I always hesitate to characterize El Niño or La Niña as good or bad. They just are, and pretty much always have been.”
— Emily Becker, University of Miami, NOAA El Niño/ Southern Oscillation forecast team
Karen Risch gardens, records weather for NOAA and CoCoRahs, writes and hikes in Ouray. Her Wunderground weather station ID is KCOOURAY3, transmitting weather from latitude N381’34”, longitude W107 40’21”, Elevation 7,736’. A purpleair.com air quality monitor RISCH operates at the same location.
