Saving Seafood

Ocean warming: more than just corals and sea level rise

November 13, 2023 — If 2023 becomes the hottest year on record globally, it will be because of the oceans. The much warmer water in the Atlantic Ocean this summer, combined with the periodic warming of the central and eastern Pacific — known as El Niño — have sent ocean temperatures to levels unprecedented in human civilization.

For people living hundreds of miles from the coastline, the oceans may be out of sight and out of mind. But as they cover 70 percent of Earth’s surface, what happens in the oceans is significant.

Rick Spinrad, an oceanographer and current Administrator of NOAA — the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration — emphasizes some foundational principles that connect oceanography and meteorology.

Read the full article at the Daily Progress

 

When climate change throws the Pacific off balance, the world’s weather follows

September 20, 2023 — The Pacific Ocean is a juggernaut. It’s the largest ocean on our planet, almost double the size of the Atlantic. Its vast expanse, exposure to trade winds, and range of temperatures makes it incredibly dynamic. All these factors contribute to create the El Niño—Southern Oscillation (ENSO), a climate pattern that affects seasonal precipitation, heat, storms, and more around the world.

ENSO is made up of three stages: El Niño and La Niña, which can both increase the likelihood of extreme weather from the Philippines to Hawaii to Peru—and the neutral phase that we are typically in. El Niño is currently underway and is predicted to go strong until winter. With it come a slew of weather patterns like exacerbated heat waves in the northern US and Canada, increased risk of flooding in the south and southeast US, delayed rainy seasons, and even droughts in countries like Indonesia and the Philippines. And this is for an El Niño period that is predicted to be strong, but not particularly extreme. But as the Pacific warms due to human-driven climate change and temperature gradients across the ocean widen, scientists warn that El Niño and La Niña periods are becoming longer, more extreme, and more frequent.

In one recent study published in the journal Nature Reviews, researchers looked at different climate models to see how ENSO has changed through the past century, and how it may shift in coming years. While El Niño and La Niña ordinarily last nine to 12 months, the vast majority of models predict that we will see them stretch out over multiple years. “In the 20th century you got about one extreme El Niño per 20 years,” says Wenju Cai, chief research scientist at the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation in Australia and lead author of the Nature Reviews paper. “But in the future, and in the 21st century on average, we will get something like one extreme event per 10 years—so it’s doubling.”

Read the full article at Popular Science

‘Very strong’ El Niño to bring warmer winter, with scorching ocean water for marine life

September 7, 2023 — A tropical weather system called El Niño is beginning its march up the coast of Oregon, bringing with it a warmer winter and inescapable heat for some marine life.

Oregonians on the coast could experience flooding from high tides and rising sea levels. In the mountains, areas hoping for snow are more likely to get rain, which could accentuate the drought plaguing the West. For aquatic species, warming ocean temperatures could spur a northern migration and could be deadly for plankton vital to salmon and other species up the food chain.

Spurred by a change in air pressure over the Pacific Ocean near the equator, El Niño last visited Oregon in the winter of 2018, and has occurred more than 20 times since 1950.

It is both an ocean and atmospheric weather pattern that touches all parts of the West.

The latest system, which recently reached the southern Oregon coast, is predicted to be among the fiercest in years, according to Oregon’s state climatologist, Larry O’Neill. There have only been three El Niños since 1970 that have reached the category of “very strong” as determined by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. The last one was in 1997.

“Generally the rule of thumb is that El Niño leads to drier, warmer weather,” he said. “In strong years, it’s led to warmer, wetter weather. We don’t know yet how robust those relationships are though.”

Read the full article at the Oregon Capital Chronicle 

Ocean off California’s Central Coast may be ‘thermal refuge’ from climate change, study says

August 23, 2023 — In an otherwise warming planet, new research shows that the ocean off California’s Central Coast may be a thermal refuge for marine wildlife.

Cal Poly associate professor Ryan Walter, who teaches physics, and fourth-year physics student Michael Dalsin analyzed temperature data gathered from 1978 through 2020 at a site just north of Diablo Canyon nuclear power plant.

They found that while other areas of the world see sharp rises in ocean temperatures and more frequent and more intense heatwaves, the Central Coast hasn’t seen such intense trends.

The region still experiences marine heatwaves and cold spells brought on by factors such as the ocean-wide climactic patterns of El Niño and La Niña, but cold current upwelling brought on by strong local winds helps maintain the marine ecosystem along the Central Coast, according to a study by Walter and Dalsin published on July 31.

Read the full story at the Merced Sun-Star

New experiment to test whether ocean warming opens a pathway for sea turtle

July 13, 2023 — Every now and then, small groups of endangered North Pacific loggerhead turtle hatchlings swim from Japan to the coastal waters of Baja Mexico and California, a journey of nearly 8,000 miles that has mystified scientists for decades.

The crux of the mystery is not how loggerheads find their way: Scientists believe they navigate the globe using Earth’s magnetic fields, as do salmon, elephant seals, some species of shark, and other turtle species. Rather, experts have puzzled over how these young, tropical, temperature-sensitive turtles manage to cross a deep-ocean zone that’s cold enough to be nearly impassable for most creatures.

“They go past the point of no return and head toward Baja, when most of the other turtles turn back,” said Stanford marine ecologist Larry Crowder. Now, an international team of scientists has released from a ship on the high seas 25 satellite-tagged turtles in an experiment that could confirm or modify the leading explanation for how they do it. Three more cohorts are planned for release over the next four years, for a total of 100 tagged turtles.

El Nino is bad news for salmon and steelhead

June 15, 2023 — The little troublemaker is back.

It’s bad-but-expected news for salmon and steelhead runs up and down the West Coast, including those that return to the Snake and Columbia rivers.

The NOAA Climate Prediction Center said last week that El Niño conditions are now present off the coast of South America, and they can be expected to gather strength by this winter.

According to a news release from the agency, the weather phenomenon is identified by the accumulation of warmer-than-normal sea surface temperatures in the Pacific Ocean west of South America near the equator.

El Niño (little boy in Spanish) influences global weather patterns.

“Depending on its strength, El Niño can cause a range of impacts, such as increasing the risk of heavy rainfall and droughts in certain locations around the world,” said Michelle L’Heureux, climate scientist at the Climate Prediction Center, in the news release.

Read the full article at the Spokesman Review

El Niño has officially begun. Here’s what that means for the U.S.

June 13, 2023 — El Niño is officially here, and that means things are about to get even hotter. The natural climate phenomenon is marked by warmer ocean temperatures in the equatorial Pacific, which drives hotter weather around the world.

“[El Niño] could lead to new records for temperatures,” says Michelle L’Heureux, a climate scientist at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s Climate Prediction Center.

The hottest years on record tend to happen during El Niño. It’s one of the most obvious ways that El Niño, which is a natural climate pattern, exacerbates the effects of climate change, which is caused by humans burning fossil fuels and releasing greenhouse gasses into the atmosphere.

Read the full article at NPR

El Niño’s arrival is imminent; 90% chance it lasts all year, forecasters say

May 11, 2023– El Niño is likely to take over soon — and odds are it will be sticking around for a long time, national forecasters said in an update Thursday.

While the Northern Hemisphere is still under “ENSO-neutral” conditions — meaning we are neither in an El Niño nor La Niña — that could change at any time. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s Climate Prediction Center said there is about an 80% chance the transition to El Niño takes place between May and July.

Once it takes hold, El Niño is likely to strengthen into the fall and winter, when it normally peaks. The odds of it lasting until February of 2024 are upwards of 90%, the Climate Prediction Center said.

Read the full article at Fox 8

Looming El Nino might be bad news for ocean life

April 26, 2023 — An El Nino is likely coming, and it’s set to be unusual in a couple of ways.

It also has the potential to wreak havoc on marine ecosystems, according to a climate research scientist with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.

Dillon Amaya with the NOAA said global ocean temperatures are already at record highs, and an El Nino can trigger additional ocean warming.

For example, he wrote in a recent article published by The Conversation, some fish increase their metabolism in warm waters by so much that they burn energy faster than they can eat, and they can die.

Read the full article at NBC 24

El Niño is coming, and ocean temps are already at record highs – that can spell disaster for fish and corals

April 18, 2023 — It’s coming. Winds are weakening along the equatorial Pacific Ocean. Heat is building beneath the ocean surface. By July, most forecast models agree that the climate system’s biggest player – El Niño – will return for the first time in nearly four years.

El Niño is one side of the climatic coin called the El Niño-Southern Oscillation, or ENSO. It’s the heads to La Niña’s tails.

During El Niño, a swath of ocean stretching 6,000 miles (about 10,000 kilometers) westward off the coast of Ecuador warms for months on end, typically by 2 to 4 degrees Fahrenheit (about 1 to 2 degrees Celsius). A few degrees may not seem like much, but in that part of the world, it’s more than enough to completely reorganize wind, rainfall and temperature patterns all over the planet.

Read the full article at The Conversation