El Nino Archives - Saving Seafood

The El Niño stars are aligning in record-breaking ways. Here’s how the high tides stack up

October 16, 2026 — With homes nearly toppling into the ocean and back-to-back floods and hurricanes amplifying our sense of dread, keeping track of all things El Niño can be overwhelming.

So I called up Patrick Barnard, who spent years leading the U.S. Geological Survey’s renowned coastal hazards team in California and now helms key climate adaptation research at UC Santa Cruz. A maestro at bringing together all manner of data, Barnard broke down the numbers in no-nonsense terms — explaining why the coming weeks and months might bring extreme flooding like we’ve never seen before.

“All the stars are aligning for a pretty dramatic winter,” said Barnard, as he pored over the El Niño tea leaves, so to speak, and rattled off every high tide phenomenon on track to converge by the holidays. “If you start stacking all these things up, the flood risk just goes up exponentially.”

Beneath the surface: what buoys reveal about ocean acidification

October 15, 2026 — What can a buoy tell us about ocean acidification? Quite a lot, especially when it has been collecting measurements for years.

In the California Current, a slow moving southward current that moves from British Columbia to Baja California, long-term observations help scientists track how ocean conditions change over hours, seasons, and years. Since natural phenomena like upwelling and El Niño rapidly alter water chemistry, continuous observations are vital for separating short-term fluctuations from broader ocean acidification trends.

Join Scripps Institution of Oceanography (Scripps) graduate student, Charles Lindsay, at sea as the recent Ocean Time-Series group, led by Uwe Send, deploy and maintain an ocean monitoring mooring off Southern California. In Anchored in the California Current: A Buoy’s View of Ocean Oscillations, readers are taken aboard a “day in the life” look at the work behind long-term ocean observations and the effort required to keep these instruments collecting data.

Read the full article at NOAA Ocean Acidification Program

How Will El Niño Affect Your Local Fisheries?

October 8, 2026 — What does El Niño mean for U.S. fisheries and marine life? What can fishermen and coastal communities expect to observe and experience as this event continues and potentially intensifies? And what are scientists at NOAA Fisheries doing to track this natural phenomenon?

The El Niño-Southern Oscillation is a powerful atmospheric cycle that occurs in the Pacific Ocean along the Equator and weakens trade winds that blow from east to west. This allows warm surface water in the Pacific to slosh back east towards the Americas. It reduces the amount of cold water upwelling that usually occurs off the coast of South America. This natural phenomenon can have intense atmospheric and oceanographic effects, such as increased precipitation, flooding, and warmer ocean temperatures. These impacts vary by geographic location but are typically felt most directly by regions within the Pacific Basin.

In June 2026, NOAA forecasters announced that El Niño had formed in the tropical Pacific. As of October, they have predicted a greater than 83 percent chance of a “very strong event” during the Northern Hemisphere fall and winter 2026–27. Experts expect this event will persist through early spring 2027, with the potential for observable impacts in marine ecosystems for months or even years afterwards.

Scientists still can’t predict exactly what will occur during this period. But NOAA Fisheries can draw upon historic observations and an abundance of data collected throughout previous El Niño events to suggest likely impacts across our ecosystems. Additionally, we are actively deploying tools and strategies to monitor and predict El Niño’s impact on the marine environment across the United States, including:

Surveys aboard NOAA vessels and aircraft
Ocean sampling using uncrewed vehicles such as gliders
State-of-the-art ocean and biological response forecasting models
Cooperative research engaging local commercial and recreational fishermen

Learn more about what you can expect from this El Niño event and what NOAA Fisheries is doing to forecast and document its impacts.

Read the full article at NOAA Fisheries

OREGON: ‘Super’ El Niño may affect Oregon salmon

October 6, 2026 — Something fishy could be happening off the Oregon coast.

A greater-than-90 % chance of a very strong El Niño is expected to develop, with warm surface water temperatures already arriving along the California coast.

Scientists are watching what warmer water could mean for local fisheries and marine life.

When we talk about El Niño or La Niña, we often focus on how it affects the weather. But underwater, the effects would mean life or death for some marine life – including salmon.

“When you go to the marine environment, it’s not always quite as rosy when there’s an El Niño event,” said Spencer Sawasake, a habitat division deputy administrator with the Oregon Department of Fish and Wildlife.

Read the full article at KATU

Guam fishers spend more time trolling, land 53% less fish in 2025

October 5, 2026 — Guam’s boat fishers spent more time trolling in 2025 and still landed 53% less fish, a drop the Western Pacific Regional Fishery Management Council has yet to explain with certainty.

The council’s Status of the Fisheries 2025 report puts the estimated pelagic catch at 326,979 pounds, less than half the average of 700,109 pounds over the past decade. Trolling hours rose 7.4% to 41,518. Active trolling vessels climbed to 466 from 447. Catch rates dropped across most species.

“Fishers had to spend more time and effort to catch the same amount of pelagic fish than in previous years,” the council said in a statement to The Guam Daily Post. Staff at the Guam Division of Aquatic and Wildlife Resources, or DAWR, believe changing ocean conditions, including possible lingering effects of the 2023 and 2024 El Niño, may have altered fish movement. Even so, the council said, “the data do not point to a single cause.”

Read the full article at The Guam Daily Post

Empty nets in Latin America as fish flee El Niño

October 1, 2026 — Fishermen along Latin America’s Pacific coast are reeling in half-empty nets as ocean warming aggravated by El Niño causes tuna, anchovies and other top catches to migrate to cooler waters.

From Ecuador and Peru in South America to Panama and Guatemala in Central America, some skippers have stopped going out altogether as fish stocks dwindle close to shore, in seas running at up to 6 degrees Celsius above normal.

“The water is warm,” Juan Ollague, 56, told AFP in the southwestern Ecuadorian port of Santa Rosa, where hundreds of idle fishing boats are crammed into a small port.

After a night on the water, Ollague returns with just six small tuna.

“We came away empty-handed,” he lamented.

“Fishing used to be good; now it’s terrible,” fellow skipper Darwin Zambrano, 53, complained as he untangled a net that hasn’t scooped up big tuna like albacore or bonito in weeks.

El Niño is the warming phase of a natural cycle in the tropical Pacific that causes hotter and drier conditions in some places, and cooler and wetter conditions in others.

Read the full article at phys.org

CALIFORNIA: Unusual shark, fish species spotted off California coast ahead of El Niño

September 29, 2026 — With warmer ocean waters and an anticipated El Niño weather event quickly approaching, local scientists are expecting some unusual guests off the Southern California coast — including hammerhead sharks, devil rays and whale sharks near La Jolla.

The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration is forecasting that the 2026-2027 El Niño weather pattern could be among the strongest on record, bringing warmer-than-average ocean temperatures and wetter, more intense winters to California.

In preparation, scientists at the La Jolla-based Scripps Institution of Oceanography launched its El Niño Resource Hub in late August to outline the ways in which El Niño could impact ocean life. The streamlined website tackles frequently asked questions from local scientists’ perspectives, drawing upon data from previous El Niño events and others like it.

“We’re at the edge of a very strong El Niño that’s bringing pretty warm water to the Southern California area, and with that we’re seeing species that are popping up that we don’t typically see in this area,” Jack Elstner, a Ph.D. candidate for biological oceanography at Scripps, told the La Jolla Light.

Read the full article at The Mercury News

Study finds El Niño events can boost nutrients in Gulf of Alaska

September 23, 2026 — The Gulf of Alaska is particularly vulnerable to the effects of events like marine heatwaves and El Niños, which can devastate its lucrative fisheries. But a new study has found El Niños can offer some benefits to the Gulf of Alaska.

Élise Beaudin is a physical oceanographer at a research facility called Ocean Networks Canada in British Columbia, and a lead author on the study, which was published in the Journal of Physical Oceanography on Sept. 10. Her research focused on what’s called the Alaska subpolar gyre, which is basically a giant counterclockwise swirl of water, thousands of miles wide, that goes around the Gulf of Alaska and into the waters around eastern Russia.

She said she was interested in studying the subpolar gyre for two reasons. The Gulf of Alaska provides critical habitat for Alaska’s fisheries. And she said it’s also interesting because of the way water circulates.

“The center of the subpolar gyre in Alaska, is extremely depleted in nutrients, especially micronutrients,” Beaudin said.

Those nutrients, like iron, silicate, and nitrate, are essential for phytoplankton, which are the base of the food chain that feeds everything else in the ocean. Beaudin said the phytoplankton living in the nutrient-depleted areas survive because of eddies, which are smaller rotating swirls inside of the gyre.

Read the full article at KMXT

El Niño is coming for the economy

September 22, 2026 — A powerful El Niño is strengthening in the Pacific, and its economic effects are already starting to show. The World Meteorological Organization expects it to strengthen further and peak near the end of the year, with an almost 100% chance that it will persist through February.

The reason markets care is that El Niño does not stay in the Pacific. It is a shift in the atmosphere system that spreads warm water eastward across the more tropical sections of the Pacific, weakening the trade winds that normally push warm surface water toward Asia.

That changes where heat and moisture accumulate, disrupting the jet stream and shifting rainfall, drought, heat and storms across different regions. For a global economy already dealing with climate change, wars and political upheaval, El Niño is mostly another headache. But not everywhere, and not for everyone.

Read the full article at Quartz

2026’s El Niño is shaping up to be a doozy – it’s already affecting global shipping, fish behavior and heat

September 14, 2026 — El Niño is here, and forecasters warn that it’s likely to be bigger and stronger in 2026-27 than any El Niño event recorded in at least 150 years.

During strong El Niños, global air and ocean temperatures spike, and precipitation patterns shift dramatically – flooding rains deluge places that are normally dry, and drought strikes some of the wettest locations on earth. With this El Niño arriving on top of already high global ocean and air temperatures, it carries the potential for extraordinary impacts to millions of lives throughout the world. Globally, August 2026 was the hottest month on record, according to data from Europe’s Copernicus climate service.

Those effects are already showing up in Central and South America.

Fishing crews in Ecuador are catching fewer tuna and traveling farther from shore to find them as fish migrate to cooler water. Coral reefs are under alert for severe risk of bleaching in many areas.

In Panama, where I live, seabirds common to Ecuador and Peru known as blue-footed boobies began showing up in large numbers in Panama earlier than usual as the sardines and anchovies they eat moved northward to escape the El Niño ocean heat.

Farmers in some regions of Panama have been unable to plant their crops. And many people here are worried about access to drinking water in the coming dry season, normally January to April but predicted to arrive at least a month earlier than usual.

The global economy is also beginning to see far-reaching effects. Worsening drought is reducing the amount of water needed to operate the Panama Canal, resulting in fewer ships with less cargo able to pass through in a day. That leads to higher transit costs for shippers of all kinds of products and slower deliveries.

I am a biologist who has been monitoring the weather in Panama and surrounding regions for the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute for almost 40 years. That includes major climatic events such as El Niño, and what I am seeing in Panama in 2026 in terms of heat and drought has already begun to exceed anything that we have measured here in over a century.

Read the full article at The Conservation