Texas and the broader Southern Plains have spent much of the past several winters under La Niña's influence, typically the driest possible outcome for the region. A strong El Niño flips that pattern, and the stakes for drought-stressed reservoirs and agriculture are real.
The Mechanism
El Niño's southward-shifted, strengthened subtropical jet stream tends to track storm systems directly across the southern tier of the U.S., from the Southwest through Texas and into the Gulf Coast and Southeast. That's the same jet stream shift driving California's wetter outlook, Texas sits further along the same storm track.
What History Shows
Past strong El Niño winters, 1997-98 and 2015-16 especially, brought above-normal rainfall and a more active severe weather season to Texas and Oklahoma, including an elevated risk of winter and early-spring severe thunderstorms along the boundary between cold Plains air and Gulf moisture. The flip side: more rain also means a higher risk of flooding in drought-hardened soils that don't absorb sudden heavy rainfall well, at least initially.
For drought monitoring specifically, this site's drought risk panel uses CHIRPS satellite rainfall data to track how conditions are actually evolving on the ground as the winter season approaches, worth checking back on as El Niño's influence becomes more established through autumn.