October 16, 2026 — With homes nearly toppling into the ocean and back-to-back floods and hurricanes amplifying our sense of dread, keeping track of all things El Niño can be overwhelming.
So I called up Patrick Barnard, who spent years leading the U.S. Geological Survey’s renowned coastal hazards team in California and now helms key climate adaptation research at UC Santa Cruz. A maestro at bringing together all manner of data, Barnard broke down the numbers in no-nonsense terms — explaining why the coming weeks and months might bring extreme flooding like we’ve never seen before.
“All the stars are aligning for a pretty dramatic winter,” said Barnard, as he pored over the El Niño tea leaves, so to speak, and rattled off every high tide phenomenon on track to converge by the holidays. “If you start stacking all these things up, the flood risk just goes up exponentially.”