A very strong El Niño was widely expected to ease the western United States drought in winter 2015/16, as in 1982/83 and 1997/98. Forecasts issued on 1 January 2016 covered winter precipitation and temperature and spring snowpack, from both empirical and dynamical methods. A common but poorly supported assumption, that anomalies scale with El Niño strength, was tested. Precipitation proved less sensitive to the signal than assumed. Only 46% of precipitation forecasts had the correct sign, against 87% for temperature and 67% for snowpack.
