Gulf of Panama Watch
Every January the trade winds cross the isthmus and cold, nutrient-rich water rises into the Gulf of Panama. In 2025 that failed for the first time in more than forty years of records. It returned in 2026, and a strong El Niño is now arriving ahead of the 2027 season, carrying warm water east across the Pacific. This page reports the weekly sonde casts as they come in.
Most recent update—
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—Most recent cast 2018–2024 mean ± 1 standard deviation
The current water column anomaly
Previous updates
The deep water station
Our normal weekly sampling stations are located in the northern part of the Gulf and go no deeper than about 44 m. This means we have been unable to track the deep cold water, which has been absent in the Gulf since the 13 August 2026, and which is key to understanding upwelling and El Niño. On the 29 October 2026 we added a new station southwest of Las Perlas in deeper water, to follow how the deeper waters respond to the growing El Niño and to keep watching through the 2027 upwelling season.
Deep station cast Limit of the weekly stations
About this page
Upwelling brings cool, nutrient-rich water into the sunlit surface layers of the Gulf, and the production that follows supports Panama's largest fishery. We reported the 2025 failure in PNAS and have monitored the Gulf since. This page is a log of observations. It is not a forecast.
- Weekly profiles
- A multiparameter sonde lowered through the water column at seven stations across the Bay of Panama. This page uses stations 3, 4 and 5, the deepest and most consistently sampled.
- Record
- Continuous since July 2017, roughly weekly, with a pandemic gap through 2020.
- Baseline
- Anomalies are against 2018–2024, week by week and depth by depth, and are leave-one-out, so no year is ever compared against itself. The baseline curves on the profiles are lightly smoothed, the casts are not.
- Data
- The underlying series are published by the STRI Physical Monitoring Program.