During the past five years an unusually prolonged warm event has occurred in the equatorial Pacific ocean. As recently discussed by Trenberth and Hoar [1996>, this prolonged warm event represents a major climate perturbation in the historical record of the Southern Oscillation. The region most affected by the warm event is the central equatorial Pacific. Upper air observations from this region are sparse. However, since 1986 observations of tropospheric winds have been made nearly continuously using the Christmas Island VHF wind profiler. These profiler observations are examined for evidence of a deep tropospheric change in circulation during the past five years by comparing observations for 1990--1995 with those taken before 1990. It is shown that there has been a substantial decrease in the magnitude of tropospheric zonal winds observed at Christmas Island. At the same time, the magnitude of the pressure difference between Tahiti and Darwin has also been substantially reduced. These observations are consistent with a prolonged warm event in which the centers of active convection over the western Pacific have moved eastward toward the dateline. We conclude that there has been a reduction in the tropospheric zonal winds over the central equatorial Pacific that are normally associated with the gradients of surface pressure and SST across this region. ¿ American Geophysical Union 1996