NOAA Scales Back Research on Record-Breaking El Niño as Scientists Warn of Missed Chance

The climate pattern is already influencing extreme weather around the planet, and forecasters say it could far outpace any El Niño in recorded history and ultimately affect millions of people. Climate experts say studying it in detail could help them better understand the phenomenon and produce more accurate forecasts to help communities prepare for droughts and floods.

During the last strong El Niño in 2015-16, NOAA mounted a rapid response research effort. It sent a research ship, planes, weather balloons and unmanned aircraft into the Pacific to collect atmospheric data. After the effort ended, NOAA staff recommended the agency be ready with a similar campaign for the next strong El Niño.

Now, with an even stronger El Niño present, NOAA will respond with a scaled-back effort. The agency is sending a handful of unmanned watercraft into the El Niño zone, but says it will not match the field campaign from last time. Any other research projects depend on Congress passing a budget, which may not happen until December, when El Niño is already peaking.

The Trump administration is also trying to eliminate NOAA's research office, the primary scientific arm that studies events like El Niño, as part of the budget process. Since Trump began his second term, NOAA has lost more than 2,000 staff, largely due to retirements and firings.

Ten weather and climate researchers who spoke with NPR said this record-breaking El Niño is a crucial case study because aspects of the naturally occurring climate pattern still are not well understood. El Niño is one of the biggest forces affecting weather on the planet, bringing destructive rainstorms and floods to some regions and severe droughts to others. Better and earlier forecast warnings can help communities with emergency response and even save lives.

Scientists are also trying to understand whether climate change and heat-trapping emissions from burning fossil fuels are making El Niños more intense. A detailed look at how this super El Niño evolves in the ocean and atmosphere could provide valuable data, much like monitoring a patient in the hospital.

"We rarely have opportunities like this," Daniel Swain, a climate scientist with the University of California Agriculture and Natural Resources, told NPR. "I almost hesitate to call it an opportunity, given that it's likely going to harm a lot of people around the world. But from a scientific perspective, it is a big natural experiment."

Few super El Niños have been scientifically observed in detail. In January 2016, on the small Pacific island of Kiritimati, NOAA began releasing weather balloons twice a day to measure the atmosphere. The island, near the equator, was in the heart of an unfolding super El Niño.

El Niño occurs when a vast area of the eastern Pacific Ocean heats up around the equator. That releases huge amounts of heat, sending ripple effects across the atmosphere and shifting weather patterns. In the southern United States, rainfall typically gets more intense, while the northern half of the country gets drier and warmer.

El Niños occur only every two to seven years, and super El Niños happen even less frequently, so few have been observed closely. The first strong El Niño measured by satellites was in 1982-83, but the data was obscured by a volcanic eruption that spewed particles into the atmosphere.

In 2015, forecasters saw a strong El Niño developing, and researchers at NOAA jumped at the chance to learn from it because less weather data is available over the ocean than on land. "You can do research after events are over for years or decades, but you have to get the observations during the event," Randy Dole, who helped lead the El Niño research campaign at NOAA's Physical Sciences Laboratory and retired in 2016, told NPR. "That was a critical consideration, and so we were going to do whatever we could, to the best of our ability, to get data that could be used both at that current time and in the future."

The team began planning six months before field research began. At NOAA, deploying a coordinated campaign in a matter of months was unusual. "That almost never happens because the big field observation programs are typically five-year planning processes," Chris Fairall, who worked on the project at NOAA and retired during the Biden administration, told NPR. "It involves getting research aircraft, research vessels, satellites and all kinds of research plans have to be drawn up."

NOAA's research team found an unexpected opportunity: during El Niño years, there are generally fewer hurricanes in the Atlantic Ocean.

Editor's Summary

A powerful El Niño that forecasters say could be the strongest on record is already affecting global weather, but NOAA is preparing a smaller research effort than it mounted in 2015-16. Scientists say detailed observations during the event could improve forecasts, yet additional projects depend on a congressional budget and the Trump administration is seeking to eliminate NOAA's research office. The agency has lost more than 2,000 staff since Trump began his second term.