A leading American oceanographer said here that it was a “difficult” time for climate-related research in the United States but there was hope that research partnerships with countries such as India would help sustain long-term programmes.
“There is concern in the U.S. about how budgets for research may fare in the current political climate,” Michael McPhaden, senior researcher at the U.S.’ National Oceanic & Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) told The Hindu .
“We may stumble, but we’ll weather this and I don’t think we’ll fall off the table.”
U.S. President Donald Trump, who last month pulled the United States out of the Paris Accord, had in 2016 proposed deep cuts — worth millions of dollars — to several agencies that fund climate-change research. These are still to be ratified by the U.S. Congress.
McPhaden is credited with leading programmes in the 1980s and 1990s to establish a system of sensors in the Pacific and Atlantic Oceans to warn of impending El Ninos.
Productive collaboration
Speaking at an event organised by the Union Earth Sciences Ministry, he said that a decade-old project with India to moor buoys and floats in the Indian Ocean to get better data on sea surface temperatures was a highly productive collaboration.
“It could serve as an exemplar of the kind of projects which would continue to be supported by the Trump administration,” he said. The dynamical climate model that India uses to forecast the monsoon was developed at the NOAA.
McPhaden is an expert on the El Nino phenomenon, which is known to adversely affect six out of ten Indian summer monsoons. He said it was still too early to say whether there is a link between global warming and a rise in the frequency and severity of the El Nino phenomenon.
“If we continue to pump out greenhouse gases as we now do, we will begin to see changes in the El Nino cycle (usually a 3-5 year oscillation of sea surface temperatures). But so far there’s no determining finger-print of how much global warming has changed it,” he said.
