West Coast Marine Heatwave to Expand, NOAA Projects
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- NOAA projections released last week show the marine heatwave — persisting since a September 2025 peak and spanning a triangle from California to Hawaii to British Columbia to Mexico — is now expected to expand and strengthen in coming months, reversing April hopes it might fade.
- Robert Rohde of Berkeley Earth said a March land heatwave that pushed temperatures more than 30F above seasonal norms and set new all-time March records at more than one-third of US weather stations "would have been impossible without a boost from climate change."
- Snowpack across Wyoming, Utah, Colorado, and New Mexico melted completely even at higher elevations as of mid-May, with the federal drought report calling this year's peak "the new benchmark low" and noting "there are no comparable years."
- California brown pelicans abandoned their Mexican nesting grounds more than two months early, a shift Audubon scientist Don Lyons linked to the 2015 Blob event that killed an estimated one million seabirds and disrupted the marine food web for years.
- Scientists tracked the first-ever great white shark in British Columbia waters as subtropical species shift north, while NOAA's Elizabeth Phillips prepares sonar surveys of krill and plankton between June and September to gauge potential ecosystem collapse.
- There is a greater than two-in-three chance of a "strong" or "extreme" El Niño later this year, and the 2015 precedent of a marine heatwave merging with El Niño produced catastrophic cascading effects across the Pacific.
- Phillips noted her NOAA Fisheries research was spared from Trump administration budget cuts that hit other parts of the agency, allowing continuous monitoring as the heatwave intensifies.
Why it matters: Oregon State climatologist Larry O'Neill warned that record-low western snowpack, an intensifying marine heatwave, and a likely strong El Niño converge into conditions for a severe wildfire season and multi-year fishery damage — the 2015 Blob precedent saw salmon populations crash for years afterward, and Phillips' NOAA team will be the primary source of data tracking whether that pattern repeats.
