In its annual forecast of the upcoming Atlantic Hurricane season, NOAA suggests the 2026 season has a 55% chance of being below normal, compared with a 35% chance of being near normal and just a 10% chance of being above normal.

The forecast, announced at a press conference at the NOAA Aircraft Operations Center in Lakeland, Fla., includes 8 to 14 named storms (with winds of at least 39 miles per hour), 3 to 6 of which will be hurricanes (with winds of at least 74 miles per hour). One to three of those are forecast to be major hurricanes (category 3 to 5 storms, with winds of at least 111 miles per hour).

A below-average number of hurricanes does not reduce the need for people to be prepared, NOAA representatives emphasized.

“Even though we’re expecting a below-average season in the Atlantic, it’s very important to understand that it only takes one.”

“Even though we’re expecting a below-average season in the Atlantic, it’s very important to understand that it only takes one,” said Under Secretary of Commerce for Oceans and Atmosphere and NOAA Administrator Neil Jacobs. “We have had category 5s make landfall in the past during below-average seasons.”

In contrast, NOAA is forecasting an above-average season in the Pacific, with a 70% likelihood of above-normal activity.

Matthew Rosencrans, lead hurricane forecaster with NOAA’s National Weather Service, noted that the Atlantic forecast does not yet contain information about potential hurricane landfalls, just the likelihood of their formation. National Weather Service Director Ken Graham said the potential for rapid intensification—when wind speed increases by at least 35 miles per hour over the course of 24 hours—makes early preparedness particularly important.

“Every category 5 that’s made landfall in this country was a tropical storm or less 3 days out,” he said. “So they rapidly intensified that quick. You think you might have a week on your timeline. The reality is you may only have days.”

“There will never be a ‘Hurricane Justa,’” he added. “There’s no such thing as just a category 1, just a tropical storm, just a category 2.…Even the smallest storm, if it’s slow enough and big enough, it’s going to be catastrophic flooding and storm surge.”

The Atlantic hurricane season runs from 1 June to 30 November. The NOAA forecast is in line with an Atlantic hurricane forecast issued 9 April by Colorado State University (CSU), which predicted 13 named storms and 6 hurricanes, including 2 major hurricanes. Similarly, a forecast released 22 April by North Carolina State University predicted 12 to 15 named storms, 6 to 9 hurricanes, and 2 to 3 major hurricanes.

All three forecasts are slightly below the average Atlantic hurricane numbers for 1991–2020: 14.4 named storms, 7.2 hurricanes, and 3.2 major hurricanes.

El Niño

The forecast for below-average activity levels largely stems from El Niño, a climate pattern that increases vertical wind shear over the tropical Atlantic. Vertical wind shear is how much the speed and direction of wind change with altitude. When wind shear is too high, it can tear a hurricane apart before it forms.

“Wind shear is good for us, bad for the hurricanes,” said Phil Klotzbach, a hurricane forecaster at Colorado State University and lead author of the CSU report.

This year, researchers suggest El Niño could become the strongest in modern history, which could have ripple effects on global temperatures. At the NOAA press conference, Jacobs said that there is a 98% chance of El Niño conditions occurring later this season and an 80% chance that it will be moderate to strong. The forecasted strength of El Niño has only grown since CSU issued its forecast, Klotzbach said.

However, in addition to high wind shear, El Niño is also characterized by unusually warm waters in the Pacific. Klotzbach compared the warm waters of El Niño to loaded dice.

“If the waters are a little bit warmer, that will load the dice for the storm to get stronger.”

“To get to a hurricane, you need to have warm water,” he said. “You need to have a lot of other stuff as well, but if the waters are a little bit warmer, that will load the dice for the storm to get stronger.”

El Niño isn’t the only reason our oceans are warming.

At a press briefing hosted by Covering Climate Now prior to the NOAA press conference, Shel Winkley, a meteorologist at Climate Central, noted that about 90% of the excess heat caused by greenhouse gas emissions has gone into Earth’s oceans, as the planet tries to keep our atmosphere in balance.

“We’re not saying that climate change necessarily creates hurricanes,” Winkley said. “But it is supercharging them: More intense winds, heavier rain, bigger flooding. That’s the connection that we can confidently draw.”

—Emily Gardner (@emfurd.bsky.social), Associate Editor

Citation: Gardner, E. (2026), NOAA forecasts a below-average hurricane season, Eos, 107, https://doi.org/10.1029/2026EO260171. Published on 21 May 2026.

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Research & Developments is a blog for brief updates that provide context for the flurry of news regarding law and policy changes that impact science and scientists today.

The National Science Foundation (NSF) has eliminated its postdoctoral fellowship funding for Earth scientists.

On the NSF website, the opportunity is listed as “archived.” This first came to the attention of Eos this week, although a Redditor had posted about the opportunity being archived as far back as March.

“What do you do when the most powerful people in the country just decide that your field shouldn’t exist anymore?” asked one Earth scientist on Bluesky.

“So, what are we doing now that we’re just not going to have new grants in GEO?” asked another.

According to the last program solicitation, posted in October 2024, the program generally awarded about $2.78 million each year, funding 8 to 10 postdoctoral fellowships. Proposals could be related to any of the disciplines within the scope of NSF’s Division of Earth Sciences (EAR), part of the NSF Directorate for Geosciences (NSF GEO).

The NSF announced an “organizational realignment” in December 2025. As part of the agencywide reorganization, GEO gained new leadership in February 2026. Joydip Kundu, the new NSF GEO Directorate Head, first joined NSF GEO in July 2025 as the agency’s deputy assistance director, coming from the NSF Directorate for Computer and Information Science and Engineering. He previously worked for the White House Office of Management and Budget (under President Obama) and the University of Maryland. Like Kundu, NSF’s new deputy directorate heads also came from within the agency.

When contacted about the archived opportunity, an NSF spokesperson confirmed to Eos that “The EAR postdoc fellowship solicitation has been archived and will not have a competition this fall. NSF regularly evaluates its portfolio of funding opportunities and will continue to explore funding opportunities for early career geoscientists.”

NSF continues to offer fellowship opportunities to postdoctoral researchers in the fields of engineering, entrepreneurial research, mathematics and physical sciences. Fellowships to postdocs in biology are available only if they involve the use of artificial intelligence.

—Emily Gardner (@emfurd.bsky.social), Associate Editor

These updates are made possible through information from the scientific community. Do you have a story about how changes in law or policy are affecting scientists or research? Send us a tip at eos@agu.org.

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This migration can be seen in these images of Canada’s Waterton Lakes National Park…

…and of Jackson Glacier in Montana’s Glacier National Park, for example.

But new research, published in the International Journal of Applied Earth Observation and Geoinformation, paints a more complicated picture: Between 2000 and 2020, 42% of tree lines shifted up, true. But 25% of them actually moved downhill.

Sabine Rumpf, an ecologist at the University of Basel in Switzerland, said many studies of tree line shifts tend to be concentrated in limited geographic areas. A preponderance are based primarily on data from North America, Europe, and the Himalayas, where researchers are more likely to have funding to head to the field to take measurements themselves.

“But that also means that a large proportion of the surface of our planet is so understudied,” Rumpf said. “And [to remedy] that, remote sensing data [are] really amazing because you can get a truly global picture, even though there’s nobody, or too few people, observing things in the field.”

Tree Lines Aren’t Living up to Their Potential

So the team set out to take a more global look. They used a world mountain map, developed in 2018, with a 250-meter resolution. They did exclude some regions from their analysis: cells with less than 10% high-mountain coverage (which have so few trees that they don’t have much of a tree line) and cells more than 95% covered with trees (which have so many trees that they don’t have much of a tree line). For their purposes, the team defined the “observed tree line” as the upper limit of trees that stand 3 meters or taller.

Then, said Rumpf, they used a model to calculate the potential tree lines for each area, because, thanks to human effects on the environment, “where these trees could be surviving is almost always higher than where the trees are currently.” The model looked at the growing season length and mean growing season temperature for each cell in the map’s grid. The researchers determined that if a cell had a growing season length of 94 days or longer, and an average growing season temperature of 6.4°C or higher, it could potentially host trees. Cells that didn’t meet both criteria were considered unable to be covered in forest, and thus above the potential tree line.

Jordon Tourville, a terrestrial ecologist with the Appalachian Mountain Club, said the overall findings are not surprising, because other studies have shown seemingly “paradoxical downslope shifts in some cases.” But he noted that whereas this study estimated potential tree lines based on temperature constraints, some scientists have suggested that factors such as nutrient availability and wind exposure are also important in determining tree line position.

Unsurprising, on Second Thought

In areas with more human disturbance, the upward spread of trees is suppressed, or even reversed.

Armed with this information about observed versus potential tree lines, the researchers hypothesized that areas with the smallest deviation between the two were mostly responding to climatic factors. In contrast, they speculated, areas with a greater difference between observed and potential tree lines were likely experiencing more anthropogenic disturbance, such as logging, agriculture, and infrastructure development.

Their hypothesis held up. In areas with less human disturbance, tree lines were moving upward more quickly (the researchers noted, though, that the upward migration of tree lines lagged behind the rate of climate change). In areas with more human disturbance, the upward spread of trees is suppressed, or even reversed.

Rumpf and several of her colleagues are located in the Alps, where glaciers are retreating, tree lines are climbing, and towns are generally more threatened by mudslides than by wildfires.

Some of the study’s findings, like a quarter of tree lines shifting down, or such a clear signal from wildfires in some areas, were at first unexpected. But after some reflection, Rumpf realized the diversity of data was a perfect example of why global-scale research is important.

“A lot of scientific funding is based in North America and Europe,” Rumpf said, which means many studies return similar results. “Then we do something global and we are surprised that things are different somewhere else on the globe?… I mean, well, duh.”

—Emily Gardner (@emfurd.bsky.social), Associate Editor

This news article is included in our ENGAGE resource for educators seeking science news for their classroom lessons. Browse all ENGAGE articles, and share with your fellow educators how you integrated the article into an activity in the comments section below.

Citation: Gardner, E. (2026), Tree lines are migrating. Some up, some down., Eos, 107, https://doi.org/10.1029/2026EO260146. Published on 12 May 2026.

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Research & Developments is a blog for brief updates that provide context for the flurry of news regarding law and policy changes that impact science and scientists today.

More U.S. scientists are running for state and federal office in the U.S. midterm elections than ever before, Nature reports. Scientist-candidates represent an array of parties, although most profiled in Nature identify as Democrats.

314 Action, an organization focused on getting Democrats with scientific backgrounds elected to public office, offers financial support and training to candidates who apply for it. This year, the organization told Nature, they’ve received nearly three times as many applications as usual.

Sam Wang, a neuroscientist at Princeton and director of the Princeton Gerrymandering Project, is running to represent New Jersey’s 12^th Congressional District.

“Usually, scientists stick with a specialized field,” Wang, a Democrat, wrote in an opinion for The Daily Princetonian. “However, I am deeply unhappy with how unequally power is divided in our society. So I have used my statistical abilities to level one part of democracy’s playing field: by repairing unfair elections.”

Why Now?

This year, Democratic candidates appear to be motivated by cuts to federal science programs, grants, and agencies, Nature reports, while Republican candidates like Jeff Wilson, who is running to represent the 13^th district of Illinois, cite the pursuit of energy independence.  Third-party scientist-candidates have also run, and scientists are entering local and municipal arenas, too.

Specifically, with the recent repeal of the Endangerment Finding, loosened restrictions on pollution, and plans to break up the National Center for Atmospheric Research, some candidates and their supporters think science needs a more prominent position in public policy.

The rise in scientist candidates may also be part of an ongoing trend. More than 200 STEM professionals ran for office in the 2024 election, as Eos reported in October 2024.

“There are a lot of people who believe that science can help us live better lives and that science really does need to be front and center when we’re making public policy,” Jess Phoenix, a volcanologist, science advocate, and former Democratic candidate for the U.S. House of Representatives told Eos at the time.

In March, thousands of people attended Stand Up for Science rallies across the country to protest the misuse of science in federal policy and extensive staffing and funding cuts to scientific agencies. Since President Trump took office in 2025, more than 10,000 PhD-level scientists have left the federal workforce, Science reported in January.

Pew research data shows that public trust in scientists has declined since the COVID-19 pandemic, but it has seen modest improvements since 2023. The latest poll, released in January, found that 77% of adults in the United States have a great deal or a fair amount of confidence in scientists to act in the public’s best interest, compared to 73% in 2023. The percentage is consistently higher among Democrats than Republicans: 90% versus 65%, in 2026. In contrast, only 27% of respondents reported at least a fair amount of confidence in elected officials.

“The last thing I want [is] to become a politician,” wrote one Redditor in response to the Nature story. “But at this rate I may not have a choice if current politicians keep screwing it up.”

—Emily Gardner (@emfurd.bsky.social), Associate Editor

These updates are made possible through information from the scientific community. Do you have a story about how changes in law or policy are affecting scientists or research? Send us a tip at eos@agu.org.

Text © 2026. AGU. CC BY-NC-ND 3.0
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