Alaskans will be flying blind after NSF decommissions ocean monitoring network

The state is also preparing for El Niño conditions later this summer.

Ocean Station Papa’s sensors and other instruments help weather forecasters and emergency response officials know ahead of time when super-storms like Halong are about to come barreling through.

“We’re looking at ocean temperatures, salinity, current, wave height and direction, wind stress,” Stratton said. “Those all feed into models that NOAA and universities use to tell us how storm systems intensify, how water levels along the coast are rising or falling, where and when we should expect the next big flooding event.”

The loss of Ocean Station Papa could make Alaska’s isolated, largely Indigenous coastal villages even more vulnerable.

“We’re seeing diseases directly linked to food security, income, intergenerational knowledge, community stability. So we’re not looking at just the biological crisis. It’s economic. It’s cultural. It’s a way of life, too,” Stratton added.

For longtime fisheries advocate Tim Bristol, executive director of the nonprofit SalmonState, pulling monitoring instruments out of the ocean seems counterintuitive.

“No matter where you are on a particular issue, you hear a desire, a call for more information, better data, more in-depth analysis, and this seems to be, you know, a sprint in the wrong direction,” Bristol said.

Thoman, the weather and climate specialist at the University of Alaska Fairbanks, said that may be true. But even if the United States, a longtime leader in the sciences, wants to bury its head in the sand about a changing ocean and warming temperatures, that doesn’t mean the information will go away.

Other nations will step in to fill the data void created by the loss of the Ocean Observatories Initiative, he believes, as their locations in international waters provide valuable data for numerous countries.

“You know the Chinese could come and plunk down a buoy there tomorrow if they’re inclined,” Thoman said. “If anyone thinks that the US, by stopping doing this, is going to stop the monitoring or stop our understanding of this, they are woefully mistaken. All of these things are international efforts.”

This story originally appeared on Inside Climate News.