January 27, 2023 — A handful of hyper-productive fisheries provide sustenance to a billion people and employ tens of millions. These fisheries occur on the eastern edges of the world’s oceans—off the West Coast of the U.S., the Canary Islands, Peru, Chile, and Benguela. There, a process called upwelling brings cold water and nutrients to the surface, which in turn supports large numbers of larger sea creatures that humans depend on for sustenance.
A new project led by researchers at Texas A&M University is seeking to understand how changes to the climate and oceans will impact fisheries in the U.S. and around the world.
“We’re interested in how climate change is going to alter upwelling and how the sustainability of the future fisheries will be impacted,” said Ping Chang, Louis & Elizabeth Scherck Chair in Oceanography at Texas A&M University (TAMU). “It turns out that when we increase the resolution of our climate models, we find that the upwelling simulation becomes much closer to reality.”
Funded by the National Science Foundation (NSF), the project aims to develop medium to long-term fishery forecasts, driven by some of the highest-resolution coupled climate forecasts ever run. It is one of the 16 Convergence Accelerator Phase 1 projects that address the ‘Blue Economy’—the sustainable use of ocean resources for economic growth. Convergence projects integrate scholars from different science disciplines.