2025 will be an above average year for Columbia River salmon, says NOAA report

The number of salmon returning to the Columbia and Snake rivers this year is expected to beat the 10-year average return. That’s according to a new report from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.

The positive projections for this year are a rare piece of good news amid a long-standing and dramatic decline in numbers of the keystone species regionally — a pattern that’s especially true for wild fish.

While NOAA’s 2024-2025 California Current Ecosystem Status Report mostly focuses on West Coast ocean conditions, it also contains significant data and projections about salmon and steelhead in the Columbia River Basin. “California Current” refers to a cold water Pacific Ocean current that moves south from Canada to northern Mexico.

Rachel Hager, a spokeswoman for NOAA Fisheries, said that recent ocean conditions and a strong El Niño weather pattern in the Pacific in 2024 indicate that Chinook salmon returns to the Columbia Basin will improve in 2025.

Though she noted important factors for salmon’s success, like ocean temperatures, young fish’s weights and the fish’s food stocks were all average in 2023. That year’s indicators are important because Chinook salmon spend two or more years in the ocean before returning to the Columbia Basin, Hager explained.

The projections mirror predictions that Washington and Oregon released earlier this year.

While NOAA’s findings are good, Hager cautioned that average returns over the past decade are “much lower than some of the returns we’ve seen over the past 25 years. So the forecast for 2025, while seemingly positive, likely does not represent the numbers of returning adults required to recover salmon populations.”

The report contains data dating back to 1980. From then until about 2000, spring Chinook, fall Chinook and steelhead populations all increased by roughly three to four times over. By 2020, however, returns fell back to their previous lows. Since then, the numbers have increased to about half or a third of their 2000s highs, before starting to decline again.

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