Scientists warn Trump plan to axe US ocean monitoring system will leave world ‘flying blind’ | US news

He warned that the Trump administration’s plan to dismantle the ocean observing system vital to understanding the climate crisis and marine ecosystems would “seriously impair” the accuracy of weather forecasts and El Niño forecasts, with economic consequences for US, European and American scientists.

Decommissioning the US system, which plays an important role in the global ocean observing network, will lead to a large increase in errors in annual estimates of ocean warming rates. research published last month.

As a result, forecasts and early warning systems for storms, tropical cyclones and El Niño can become distorted “sometimes dangerously,” according to Sabrina Speich, a global ocean monitoring expert at the Ecole Normale Supérieure (ENS) in Paris and chair of the Global Climate Observing System’s ocean expert panel.

The Ocean Observatories Initiative (OOI), operated by the U.S. National Science Foundation, is a vast network of seafloor systems, underwater gliders, and moored surface platforms that provide data to researchers, policymakers, educators, and mariners worldwide. The initiative, which covers both the US coast and extends into the North Atlantic and Southern Ocean, has been used to study marine heat waves, harmful algal blooms, subduction zone earthquakes, ocean acidification and fisheries variability.

Its dismantling would eliminate a key component of the Global Ocean Observing System (GOOS), a network of robotic buoys, moored buoys and research vessels that experts describe as the “eyes and ears” of the ocean. Data-driven warning systems “save lives,” experts say.

forward-thinking research published Nature Climate Change Last month showed how data losses in GOOS, a UN-coordinated framework for ocean data on weather and climate collected by various countries, could disrupt ocean temperature forecasts that support weather forecasting, El Niño forecasts and fisheries management. It turns out that losing US observations would be worse than randomly losing 80% of all ocean data worldwide. U.S.-funded platforms span every ocean basin and fill critical gaps that no other country is currently filling.

“Ocean heat content is the most robust indicator of climate change that we have, not just for what’s happening in the ocean, but for the entire climate system,” said Speich, a co-author of the study. Vertical temperature profiles that provide ocean heat content are “among the simplest measurements we can make,” he said.

“If you lose them, you lose the ability to track not only ocean warming but the climate system as a whole; they are representations of variables that become unusable once observations stop.

“Predictions will continue, but will sometimes fall dangerously low. Atmospheric observations alone are not enough,” Speich said. “Ocean data [is] It forms the basis of early warning systems for tropical storms, hurricanes and El Niño. “And the consequences wouldn’t be limited to science: the economic costs would be felt in the United States itself, from agriculture to insurance to disaster response.”

He said the loss of U.S. observations, combined with what is predicted to be an El Niño year of “overloaded” weather extremes, “could also lead to a loss of the ability to see a clear sense of timely action coming.”

“The risks are tangible: Farmers in the US and South America are using El Niño forecasts to decide what to plant and when; whether to expect drought or flood shapes every agricultural decision months in advance.”

The most recent El Niño, which occurred in 2023-2024, was one of the five strongest El Niños on record and contributed to a record increase in global temperature in 2024.

According to research by Speich and his co-authors, removing only US observations would result in a 163% increase in error in annual ocean warming rates.

on thursday, The European Union says it will step up its own monitoring of the world’s oceans By investing in a €92 million ($107 million) venture called OceanEye, more than half of which will go to GOOS. The announcement by the European Commission had been planned for a long time and was not a direct response to the US move.

John P Abraham, professor of engineering at the University of St Thomas in Minnesota and co-author of the research paper, called the US administration’s move to eliminate the $368 OOI system “penny wise, pound for pound stupid”.

“The US government wants to save less than a billion dollars on sensors that are the eyes and ears of the ocean,” Abrahams said. “We have climate costs in the hundreds of billions of dollars annually. The cost of the observing system is a tiny fraction of the climate costs from hurricanes and storms that hit the United States.”

The USA suffered more than 400 climate and weather disasters In cases where damages exceed or reach $1 billion, Between 1980 and 2024. In 2024 alone, the cost of such disasters reached $177 billion. This “billion-dollar climate and weather product” managed by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (Noaa) will no longer be updated due to “evolving priorities,” according to a note on its website.

The system is “a pretty cheap way to reduce climate-related costs,” Abraham said.

“This isn’t about saving money, this is about killing climate science research,” Abrahams said.

Ocean observations are ” irreplaceable ” because “we can’t see the deep ocean from space,” said Samantha Burgess, strategic climate lead for the Copernicus Climate Change Service (C3S), the European Union’s Earth observation system that combines European space data with in-situ measurements to track changes and provide forecasts. “They save lives,” he said, warning us of severe storms.

Burgess said: “We need international collaboration to obtain the best available observations to reduce risks in our changing world. Without ocean observations we are flying blind.”

A statement earlier this week by the National Science Foundation, which funds and oversees OOI, said the program had not been canceled entirely and that plans were described as “reducing scope” or reducing elements, but it was not clear what data collection capacity would remain.