In a report published August 27, 2026, NASA Earth Observatory described back-to-back winter storms in August 2026 that left parts of the Atacama Desert in northern Chile under a rare blanket of snow. The region has seen snow before, notably in 2025 and earlier in 2011, but one of the 2026 events was unusually widespread, stretching from the Andes to near the Pacific coast. Satellite images captured the Chajnantor plateau, home to the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA), before and after the severe weather; ALMA suspended operations and moved its antennas into a protective survival mode, according to the report.

A further storm in the second half of the month covered an even wider area. René Garreaud, an atmospheric scientist at the University of Chile, linked the late-August storm to a cutoff low spun off from an unusually large trough. He said totals reached a magnitude "rarely seen in the otherwise extremely arid region." At Taltal on the northern coast, nearly 40 millimeters (1.6 inches) of rain fell in three days, about 10 times its annual mean, he said. Chile's SENAPRED reported thousands affected and hundreds of homes with major damage. Garreaud cited a strengthening El Niño as the backdrop.