FOX Weather’s forecasters say the odds of a blanket of snow on Thanksgiving Day are poor in the northern half of the country this year. Their reasoning starts in the equatorial Pacific, where water temperatures in the central part of the basin averaged more than 2 degrees Celsius above normal in September. That is the threshold for what meteorologists call a super El Niño.
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The holiday forecast is not a promise about any single storm, since Thanksgiving is still more than three weeks off and weather models cannot see that far with confidence. What the forecasters are describing is a tilt in the odds, built on how strong El Niño winters have tended to behave and on one unusual feature high above the pole.
What a super El Niño does to the jet stream
In its analysis of the coming holiday, the FOX Forecast Center said El Niño is generally not conducive to white Thanksgivings across the Northern Tier and the Midwest, because a warm ridge of high pressure tends to set up. Warm Pacific air also limits how much arctic air can slide south out of Canada, which is the ingredient the northern states need most for holiday snow cover.
The label itself is still provisional. Central equatorial Pacific waters must stay that warm for three months before the event officially counts as a super El Niño, and the forecasters wrote that NOAA expects those conditions to develop later this year. The Climate Prediction Center’s October 8 update put the Niño-3.4 index at +2.1 degrees Celsius and gave better than an 83 percent chance of a strong-to-very-strong event for January-March 2027.
The Climate Prediction Center also gave odds for the extreme end of the scale. It put the chance of a three-month relative index of +2.5 degrees Celsius or higher at 54 percent for September-November, 83 percent for October-December and 70 percent for November-January. Those percentages are about ocean temperatures, not snow, but they show how seriously the agency treats the chance that the event peaks right around the holiday season.
2019 and the 20-state benchmark
The yardstick FOX Weather used is snow coverage. The last Thanksgiving with significant snow on the ground in more than 20 states was 2019, when several storms buried much of the country west of the Mississippi River. No year since has matched it, which means a first widespread white Thanksgiving in seven years is the bar that 2026 would have to clear, and the El Niño setup works against it.
The outlook is not one-sided. Snow on the ground by Thanksgiving depends on how far south arctic air can push and on whether storms interact with that air, and a single well-timed system can deliver a white holiday to a few cities even when the national map stays bare. The forecasters were describing coverage across many states, not a guarantee for any one city.
Thanksgiving falls on November 26, 25 days after this forecast was written.
The eastern Pacific is running even hotter than the central region FOX cites. The Climate Prediction Center reported Niño-3 at +3.0 and Niño-1+2 at +3.9 degrees Celsius on October 8, alongside the +2.1 reading for Niño-3.4, and described the event as still strengthening under an El Niño Advisory. A warming trend that has not peaked means the atmospheric response FOX describes, a warm ridge and a restrained supply of Canadian cold, could firm up toward the holiday instead of fading before it.
The polar vortex wildcard
The factor that could still upset the pattern is the polar vortex. The FOX Forecast Center wrote that El Niño can increase the odds of a weakened polar vortex, though that usually happens late in winter, and that most long-range models show a major disruption beginning in the second week of November, which would be the earliest on record.
The data behind that claim is public. A forecast summarized by The Watchers showed stratospheric winds at 60 degrees north falling to 4.15 meters per second on November 3, far under the 14.35 meter-per-second record low for the date. A weak vortex lets cold escape south, but where it lands is uncertain. Andrej Flis of severe-weather.eu put the European model’s odds of a full wind reversal at 96 percent, while the Weather Network’s meteorologist Tyler Hamilton wrote that a disruption in November matters less than one in January or February because the Arctic has little cold air in early winter.
The warm-Pacific signal is the steadier of the two forces, because El Niño changes the jet stream over months, while a vortex disruption is a single event whose surface effects take weeks to show up and can miss North America entirely. Forecasters at the Weather Network said as much for Canada, where a milder start to winter remains the seasonal call even with a possible disruption. The resulting tug-of-war, as FOX describes it, pits Arctic air against milder Pacific air. The winner will decide whether the country sees its first widespread white Thanksgiving in seven years. The 20-state snow benchmark from 2019 is the figure to check against when late-November snow-cover maps arrive.
This article was produced with the assistance of AI and reviewed by Morning Overview editors prior to publication.
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