NOAA scales back El Niño research as super event peaks

Four unmanned watercraft replace the ships, planes and balloons of 2016

The El Niño now forming in the Pacific Ocean is shaping up to be the strongest ever recorded, and federal forecasters say extreme weather tied to the event is already rippling outward, NPR reported. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration is preparing a research response that is markedly smaller than the one it mounted for the last strong event, in 2015-16, at a moment when the agency’s own research capacity is being cut.

Climate researchers say studying this El Niño in detail could improve forecasts that warn communities of droughts, floods and severe storms. “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.”

El Niño occurs when a vast area of the eastern Pacific Ocean heats up around the equator, releasing large amounts of heat into the atmosphere and shifting weather patterns globally, according to NPR. In the southern United States, rainfall typically becomes more intense, while the northern half of the country grows drier and warmer. El Niños occur every two to seven years, and super El Niños happen even less often, so few have been scientifically observed in detail. The first strong El Niño measured by satellites, in 1982-83, had its data obscured by a volcanic eruption that spewed particles into the atmosphere, NPR reported.

When a strong El Niño developed in 2015, NOAA staff who had run a rapid-response campaign recommended the agency be ready with a similar effort for the next event, NPR reported. Randy Dole, who helped lead the 2015-16 campaign at NOAA’s Physical Sciences Laboratory and retired in 2016, told NPR that capturing observations during the event was critical. “You can do research after events are over for years or decades, but you have to get the observations during the event,” Dole said. “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 2015-16 campaign moved unusually fast, according to NPR. The agency began planning six months before field research began, an unusual pace for a coordinated campaign. NOAA launched weather balloons twice a day from Kiritimati, a small Pacific island near the equator that sat in the heart of the unfolding event, as well as eight times per day from a research ship on a month-long cruise. A NOAA research plane took 22 flights across the Pacific to drop parachute-equipped instruments into forming storms, and the resulting data was fed to weather forecast models in real time. Chris Fairall, who worked on the project and retired during the Biden administration, told NPR that such speed was rare. “That almost never happens because the big field observation programs are typically five-year planning processes,” Fairall said. The team found an opening in NASA’s plans to fly its Global Hawk unmanned aircraft over Atlantic hurricanes in 2016; with fewer hurricanes that El Niño year, the flights were redirected to the Pacific.

The 2015-16 event also revealed how much room forecasts had to improve, NPR reported. California had braced for damaging rainstorms and flooding that did not materialize, with precipitation below average for most of the winter, while South Carolina saw catastrophic flooding. After the campaign, the team’s recommendation was to pre-plan for the next event, Dole told NPR. “The recommendation was: let’s pre-plan for next time, because there will be a next time,” Dole said. “We should be aware that nature’s loading the dice for us and exactly what comes up, we don’t know.”

For the current El Niño, NOAA is deploying four wind-powered unmanned watercraft, known as Saildrones, on a four-month mission to sail toward the equator and measure ocean temperatures and other data, NPR reported. Annarita Mariotti of NOAA’s Climate Program Office said in an email that the agency hopes to enhance observation and prediction of this El Niño with $2 million to $5 million for research, but that the money depends on Congress passing a new budget. The federal government is currently operating under a temporary budget measure, a continuing resolution that lasts through Dec. 11. NOAA’s Office of Marine and Aviation Operations, which manages the agency’s research ships and planes, told NPR there are no specific missions planned to study El Niño at this time. “I’m not super optimistic about anything happening quickly on the federal level these days,” Swain said.

The Trump administration is seeking, for a second year, to eliminate NOAA’s Office of Oceanic and Atmospheric Research, the agency’s primary scientific arm for studying events like El Niño, NPR reported, citing the administration’s budget proposal. The proposal “eliminates all funding for climate, weather, and ocean laboratories and cooperative institutes” in the interest of focusing “on NOAA’s public safety mission,” and would transfer some research to the National Weather Service. Last year, Congress preserved the office while shifting some of its budget to the Weather Service. The administration is also seeking to cut climate-change research spending across NOAA, including programs it says “spread baseless environmental alarm.” Earlier this year, the administration announced it would begin removing the Ocean Observatories Initiative, an ocean-monitoring system that provides key sea-temperature data; that decision was reversed this summer after pushback from the scientific community, NPR reported.

NOAA has lost more than 2,000 staff since President Trump began his second term — roughly 20% of the agency, largely through retirements and firings — according to data from the U.S. Office of Personnel Management cited by NPR.

Marty Ralph, director of the Center for Western Weather and Water Extremes at UC San Diego’s Scripps Institution of Oceanography, told NPR that aircraft measurements of atmospheric rivers — the heavy-rain storms behind many of California’s most destructive floods — improve predictions of where a storm will hit the West Coast and how hard it will rain. “We really need the satellite data, but it doesn’t give the precision and detail of how strong the atmospheric river is, what its structure is, how much water vapor it’s carrying,” Ralph said. “We’ve proven out that these careful measurements from the aircraft offshore make a big difference for the forecast’s skill for the West Coast.” Ralph’s project has previously partnered with NOAA to collect data on the agency’s “hurricane hunter” aircraft, and he expects that to continue this winter, though he described the request as “in a very tight budget environment.”

Swain told NPR that better field data also tests whether forecast models represent El Niño correctly. “The models that we’ve got are decidedly imperfect in their representation of it,” Swain said. “So anytime you get a really big signal, it gives a good case to test whether the models are behaving correctly in the real world.”

Some studies have found that El Niños are already becoming more intense because of climate change, but computer models that simulate the phenomenon still need improvement, according to NPR. Heat trapped by emissions from burning fossil fuels has already warmed the planet by 1.5 degrees Celsius (2.7 degrees Fahrenheit), and most of that heat has been absorbed by the ocean. Michael McPhaden, a senior scientist at the University of Washington and a NOAA scientist until earlier this year, told NPR that more detailed field observations are essential. “There’s still a lot of uncertainty about how those processes work,” McPhaden said. “We need more examples of well-sampled El Niños to develop a better understanding of how they work and to improve our predictive skill.” He added that “this big event may be connecting the dots for us in a way that is even more compelling about the fingerprint of climate change,” and that “field data is irreplaceable — it’s an absolutely essential part of the mix of information that we use to draw conclusions about consequential phenomena like El Niño and La Niña.”

Earlier this year, MSI reported on a parallel cut to ocean observation infrastructure: the National Science Foundation began “descoping” the Ocean Observatories Initiative, a $386 million network of more than 900 sensors, prompting a unanimous Senate bill and a later reversal of the decision to dismantle it. (MSI, June 23, 2026)