Super El Niño Could Be Biggest Ever, but NOAA Isn't Watching

A super El Niño forecasters say could be the largest on record is peaking just as NOAA scales back the field research campaign it promised after 2016.

Federal forecasters say the El Niño now brewing in the Pacific could become the biggest yet, far outpacing any in recorded history and ultimately impacting millions of people. During the last strong El Niño in 2015-16, NOAA mounted a rapid response: a research ship, planes, weather balloons and NASA's unmanned Global Hawk aircraft were all sent into the Pacific to gather data. This time, the agency is deploying only four wind-powered Saildrones on a four-month mission toward the equator to measure ocean temperatures, and says it will not match the 2016 effort. NPR reports that NOAA's Office of Marine and Aviation Operations says no specific ship or plane missions are currently planned to study the event, which approaches its winter peak in November and December.

The 2015-16 campaign was itself extraordinary: balloons released twice daily from Kiritimati Island, eight launches a day from a month-long ship cruise, and 22 research flights dropping instruments into storms, with data fed to forecast models in real time. NOAA staff afterward explicitly recommended pre-planning the same effort for the next super El Niño — the one now arriving. "The recommendation was: let's pre-plan for next time, because there will be a next time," Randy Dole, who helped lead the 2016 campaign, told NPR. Instead, NPR reports the agency hopes for just $2 million to $5 million for El Niño research, contingent on Congress passing a budget that may not arrive until December, when the event is already peaking under a temporary funding measure through Dec. 11.

El Niños occur every two to seven years, and super El Niños far less often, so few have ever been studied in detail. NPR notes the first strong El Niño measured by satellite, in 1982-83, had its data obscured by volcanic particles in the atmosphere. Because weather data is far sparser over oceans than land, the in-event observations are irreplaceable: "You can do research after events are over for years or decades, but you have to get the observations during the event," Dole told NPR. Ten researchers who spoke to NPR say the pattern still isn't well understood, and scientists are trying to determine whether climate change is making El Niños more intense. Climate scientist Daniel Swain calls it, warily, "a big natural experiment" that is likely to harm many people.

Better observations translate directly into warnings: El Niño shifts weather worldwide, bringing destructive rainstorms and floods to some regions and severe droughts to others. The 2015-16 event brought catastrophic flooding to South Carolina even as California's feared storms never materialized, showing how much forecasting still has room to improve. NPR reports that UC San Diego researchers have found aircraft readings near atmospheric rivers — the West Coast's most destructive storms — improve forecasts of where storms hit and how hard, beyond what satellites alone provide. Meanwhile, NPR reports the Trump administration is seeking to eliminate NOAA's Office of Oceanic and Atmospheric Research for a second year, and the agency has lost roughly 20% of its staff, over 2,000 people, since the second term began.