Action Taken To Protect Fish At Bottom Of Ocean Food Chain

Preface:

The Council took action to prohibit new directed fisheries on a list of  currently unmanaged, largely unfished forage species this week which brings the following species and species groups into all four of the Council’s FMPs as ecosystem component (EC) species:
• Round herring (Etrumeus teres) and thread herring (Opisthonema libertate and O. medirastre)
• Mesopelagic fishes of the families Myctophidae, Bathylagidae, Paralepididae, and Gonostomatidae
• Pacific sand lance (Ammodytes hexapterus)
• Pacific saury (Cololabis saira)
• Silversides (family Atherinopsidae)
• Smelts of the family Osmeridae
• Pelagic squids (families: Cranchiidae, Gonatidae, Histioteuthidae, Octopoteuthidae, Ommastrephidae (except Humboldt squid, Dosidicus gigas), Onychoteuthidae, and Thysanoteuthidae)

The above species would be known as “Shared EC Species,” meaning that they are shared between all of the FMPs 

A new rule prohibits new fisheries on forage fish species including silversides, shown here.
Paul Asman and Jill Lenoble/Flickr

by Cassandra Profita OPB

West Coast fishery managers adopted a new rule Tuesday that protects many species of forage fish at the bottom of the ocean food chain.

The rule prohibits commercial fishing of  herring, smelt, squid and other small fish that aren’t currently targeted by fishermen. It sets up new, more protective regulations for anyone who might want to start fishing for those species in the future.

The Pacific Fishery Management Council unanimously voted to adopt the rule at a meeting in Vancouver, Washington. The council sets ocean fishing seasons off the coasts of Washington, Oregon and California.

The idea behind the new rule is to preserve so-called forage fish so they’re available for the bigger fish, birds and whales that prey on them. It’s part of a larger push by the council to examine the entire ocean ecosystem when setting fishing seasons.

Environmentalists who have been advocating for the rule for years celebrated the approval.

“If we’re going to have a healthy ocean ecosystem in the long term, we have to protect that forage base,” said Ben Enticknap of the environmental group Oceana. “These are the backbone of a healthy ocean ecosystem.”

Enticknap said many of the forage fish subject to the new rule are already being fished elsewhere in the world. Little fish at the bottom of the food chain are used to make fish meal for aquaculture, and they’re increasingly in demand as food for people as other fish populations decline.

Previous rules only required managers to be notified of a new fishery on non-managed forage fish species. Now, the council will require a more rigorous scientific review to prove that the new fishery won’t harm the ecosystem before it is allowed.

“Really, it’s being precautionary,” said Enticknap. “It’s getting out ahead of a crisis rather than waiting for a stock to collapse and then having to have serious consequences for fisheries after the fact.”

The rule has gained broad support — even from the fishing industry, according to Steve Marx of the Pew Charitable Trusts. Valuable commercial fish such as rockfish, salmon, halibut and tuna all prey on forage fish.

“The fishing industry support has been pretty strong because everybody understands how important these small forage fish are to the fish they like, that they make a living off of,” he said.

Rod Moore, executive director of the West Coast Seafood Processors Association, congratulated the council on moving forward with the rule.

“It’s rare to get this sort of consensus support from commercial, environmental and recreational sectors, and I think you have it on this one,” he said.

Before voting, council members discussed the best way to allow existing fisheries to catch some of the forage fish species incidentally – as they’re targeting other fish.

The council directed staff to continue developing the details of the rule so that it doesn’t constrain existing fisheries, but it does discourage fishing boats from targeting forage fish.

Councilors instructed staff to hold fishing boats accountable the forage fish they catch and consider discouraging development of at-sea processing of forage fish species into fish meal.

Read original post: www.opb.org

NBCNews.com Replaces Reality, Regulation and History with Hyperbole

Original post: AboutSeafood.com | © 2015 National Fisheries Institute | Published with permission.

A story this week on NBCnews.com about the state of the seafood industry is packed with sensationalism and hyperbole, yet absent much of the real science, facts and figures that drive actual sustainability.

To begin, U.S. fisheries are among the world’s best managed and most sustainable. Though not referenced by name a single time in this article, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, NOAA, regulates U.S. seafood with headquarters in Washington D.C., five regional offices, six science centers and more than 20 laboratories around the country and U.S. territories.

Author John Roach, however, perpetuates doom and gloom throughout this piece, asserting “voids” left by cod, halibut and salmon that need to be filled by other fish. We’re guessing Mr. Roach isn’t aware that salmon shattered modern-day records in 2014, returning to the Columbia River Basin in the highest numbers since fish counting began at Bonneville Dam more than 75 years ago. Could you tell us again about that void?

Mr. Roach also intones a narrative of sustainability disaster for popular predators like tuna but forgot to mention groups like the International Seafood Sustainability Foundation (ISSF), a coalition created through a partnership between WWF, the world’s leading conservation organization, and canned tuna companies from across the globe to insure the long-term conservation and sustainable use of tuna stocks. In an article that claims the sky is falling for species like tuna it’s odd that ISSF gets nary a nod or even a mention.

Switching gears, Mr. Roach goes on to blame giant trawlers “armed” with technology and massive nets as part of the reason we’re “running low” on fish. As in any industry, technology gets better by the day, creating more efficient ways to do business. However, new technology is by no means exempt from standing national and global fishery regulations, such as catch-limits, by-catch laws, compliance, and so forth. To suggest that enhanced technology or “bigger or faster” boats are causing our fish supplies to dwindle ignores the impact of technology on sustainability and even regulatory oversight. There are pros and cons to every catch-method and there is no one-size-fits all solution to sustainability challenges but to blame technology without recognizing its contribution to solutions is folly.

Hyperbolic rhetoric about sustainability continues to be discounted by legitimate fisheries experts in the scientific community. In fact, one “report” forecasting empty oceans by 2048 was challenged by a number of independent researchers who described the study that promoted the statistics as, “flawed and full of errors.” Including Ray Hilborn, a professor of aquatic and fishery sciences at the University of Washington in Seattle whose research into the study lead him to say, “this particular prediction has zero credibility within the scientific community.” After Hilborn’ s analysis the author of the original study himself explained that his research was not in fact predicting worldwide fish stock collapse at all but merely examining trends. Articles like this track along precisely with the discounted, overblown storyline that gave birth to the empty oceans by 2048 nonsense.

Whether you’re a “natural optimist” or not, there is no question that seafood harvested from U.S. fisheries is inherently sustainable as a result of NOAA’s fishery management process and global fisheries management is far from the wild west scenario bandied about.  Things aren’t perfect and there’s work to be done but the “game” is not “almost over” and those who suggest it is, willfully propagate that narrative not because it’s accurate but because bad news sells.

California drought likely a fixture, says Stanford study

Two piers lay on the shoreline at Shadow Cliffs Regional Recreation Area in Pleasanton, Calif., on Friday, Jan. 9, 2015. The man-made lake’s water level remains at historically low levels, about 10 feet below normal for the winter season. (Doug Duran)

Human-caused climate change is increasing drought risk in California — boosting the odds that our current crisis will become a fixture of the future, according to a major report Stanford scientists released Monday.

The finding comes as cities across the Bay Area wrap up the warmest three-month stretch of winter on record.

The new study looked at data from the past and simulations foretelling the future to understand the influence of greenhouse gases on California.

“What has happened in California has been a clear warming trend over the historical record … that probably would not have happened without humans,” said Stanford climate scientist Noah Diffenbaugh.

The continuation of global warming “will result in more frequent occurrences of high temperatures and low precipitation that will lead to increased severe drought conditions,” said Diffenbaugh. The research was published in the March 2 issue of the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Low precipitation, alone, doesn’t cause a drought — what matters is whether it happens in a warm year, according to members of the Stanford team. They don’t offer specific recommendations but say their findings could help California plan for the future.

The news comes on the eve of this winter’s third manual snow survey, taken atop the Sierra on Highway 50. Other readings reveal that statewide, the snowpack water content is just 19 percent of the historical average for the date.
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Reinforcing the drought’s threat, one weather agency is reporting that many Bay Area cities have broken records for the warmest winter in history. Average temperatures for December through February were 54.44 degrees in San Jose, up from the 54.42 degree record of 1996; 52.62 degrees in Livermore, up from the 51.72 degree record of 1996; and 57 degrees in San Francisco, up from the 55.70 degree record of 1970, according to Jan Null of Golden Gate Weather Services.

The Stanford study supports the growing recognition that warming temperatures can worsen a drought that is driven by declining precipitation, noted Richard Seager of Columbia University’s Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory, who was not involved in the research.

“This is happening all over the world — there is nothing unusual in terms of California,” said Seager.

The Stanford team previously reported that the conditions behind our current drought — a high pressure system parked over the Pacific Ocean, diverting storms away from California — are much more likely to occur amid concentrations of greenhouse gases.

The new study goes further. Using a recently released trove of 120 years of historical data, the researchers found more than a doubling of the frequency of drought years. There were six droughts in past 20 years (1995-2014), compared to 14 in the previous 98 years (1896-1994.)

What’s happening? Imagine flipping two coins, one for precipitation and one for temperature, said Diffenbaugh, associate professor of Environmental Earth System Science at Stanford.

Until recently, precipitation and temperature occurred independently.

But climate change means that the temperature coin is landing on warm weather most of the time. So even as precipitation varies, the combination of both warm and dry is more common. We see little rain, snow melts earlier, and soil and plants lose more water.

“Low precipitation isn’t enough to create a drought. The key difference is temperature,” said Diffenbaugh. And that’s what is changing.

Seager agrees that climate change will produce warmer weather, although he contends that our recent extreme heat is due to natural variations in sea surface temperatures, “far in excess of what you would expect from background greenhouse gases,” based on his National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration-sponsored research.

He agrees that California “will also face tremendous water problems as the climate changes, because of warmer temperatures, less snow, shorter and sharper winters, and warming that takes moisture out of the soil.”

The Stanford team doesn’t have data for the future, of course, and it’s impossible to run a real-world experiment. So they created climate simulations to peer into the future.

Their models show that the warming trend is likely to continue, boosting the odds that a heads-tails coin toss — co-occurring warm and dry years, creating drought — will climb in the coming decades.

Droughts have occurred throughout California’s pre-human history, just as the coin toss example would predict, they say. And nature creates its own variability, with volcanic eruptions and solar fluctuations.

But steadily rising temperatures — caused by burning fossil fuels and clearing forests — increases the probability of such conditions, they found.

“Continued global warming will result in more frequent occurrences of high temperatures and low precipitation,” said Diffenbaugh, “leading to more of the severe drought conditions that we’ve been experiencing.”

Read the original post: MercuryNews.com | By Lisa M. Krieger

Sen. Murkowski Defines Goal of Commercial Fishing Discharge Exemption Bill

SEAFOODNEWS.COM | Published by permission

Congress will consider a new effort during the current session to take vessel discharge regulations off the books for commercial, fishing and recreational vessels that are less than 79 feet in length.

That’s S.387, introduced Feb. 4 and sponsored by Sen. Lisa Murkowski, R-Alaska.

Co-sponsors are Senators Barbara Boxer, D-CA, Maria Cantwell, D-WA, and Dan Sullivan, R-AK.

“For those who need a little more graphic detail as to what we’re talking about, when you take a commercial fishing vessel out, your 45-foot commercial fishing vessel, and you have a good day fishing, you’ve got some salmon guts on the deck,” Murkowski said. “You’ve got a little bit of slime. You hose it off. That would be an incidental discharge that would be reportable to the EPA and if you fail to report, you could be subject to civil penalties. That’s what we’re talking about here.”

The senator said current Environmental Protection Agency regulations are so broadly written that they would penalize Alaska’s fishermen and more than 8,000 boats statewide simply for rinsing fish guts off their decks, or rainwater washing other materials off of their decks.

Alaska’s congressional delegation has been trying for several years to get a permanent exempt for these vessels through Congress. Last year Murkowski and former Sen. Mark Begich, D-Alaska, introduced similar legislation.

Copyright SeafoodNews.com | Read original story here.

With West Coast Port Talks Gridlocked, U.S. Labor Secretary Intervenes to Press For a Deal

Copyright © 2015 Seafoodnews.com | Posted by permission

With idled cargo ships piling up along the coastline, President Obama ordered his labor secretary to California to try to head off a costly shutdown of 29 West Coast ports.

Obama dispatched Tom Perez on Saturday to jump-start stalled labor talks between shipping companies and the dockworkers’ union. The move ramps up pressure to resolve a dispute that stranded tens of thousands of containers on cargo ships over the holiday weekend.

The Los Angeles and Long Beach ports account for some 40% of the nation’s incoming container cargo, with $1 billion in goods moving through daily. A prolonged shutdown could hobble some Southland businesses and ripple across the U.S. economy.

On Saturday morning, 32 massive ships were anchored outside the ports, unable to unload thousands of cargo containers filled with auto parts, electronics and clothes destined for store shelves across the country.

“Any company that imports supplies, inventory or parts is going to feel it,” said Ian Winer, a managing director at Wedbush Securities. “There are very few companies who don’t have something coming through those ports.”

That has businesses across the world focused on a dispute between a network of terminal operators and one of the strongest unions left in American industry.

After nine months of talks, the two sides agree on key issues including healthcare but remain gridlocked over rules governing the removal of arbitrators, who settle disputes on the docks.

At stake is a new contract for roughly 20,000 dockworkers at 29 West Coast ports. The International Longshore and Warehouse Union has been working without one since July amid negotiations with the Pacific Maritime Assn.

The association has accused union workers of slowdown tactics and has at times halted the unloading of ships, including this weekend. The local union denies the allegations. The unloading of ships is expected to resume Tuesday.

But the congestion has been building for months, because of the labor dispute and other factors. And the holiday weekend stoppage heightens fear of a longer-term disruption.

Some businesses have attempted expensive workarounds, rerouting goods via air or through Gulf and East Coast ports, analysts said. Items ordered by retailers for the spring probably won’t reach stores on time. Deliveries from Asian manufacturers could be delayed until after the Chinese New Year, which starts next week.

For now, retailers still have inventory left over from the holiday season, analysts said. But they will need shipments before the busy spring shopping season.

Communities close to the ports have been hit first and hardest. In Los Angeles, which has recovered slowly from the recession, truck drivers and warehouse workers are already seeing their hours cut.

Elsewhere in the state, the agriculture industry is in pain..

Ronald C. Leimgruber, namesake and owner of a farm in Holtville in southeastern California, said his small company normally exports two or three 20-ton loads of alfalfa hay and grasses a week . Now, he’s forced to stockpile it or sell it cheaper domestically.

“You do whatever you can to survive,” he said.

Customers have canceled orders, and Leimgruber fears they may never come back. His sister’s trucking company is also suffering. She usually sends 24 loads of goods to the ports each week, he said. It’s dropped to five. She’s laid off all but a few of her employees.

“All those wives won’t get a good Valentine’s Day, because their husbands aren’t working,” Leimgruber said.

Companies across the globe will also feel the effects. A shift toward “just in time” manufacturing means companies keep their inventories low, making them far more susceptible to supply chain interruptions.

Honda North America Inc. will slow production at factories in Ohio, Indiana and Canada because it can’t get crucial parts from Japan, said spokesman Mark Morrison.

The company has tried using air cargo and special truck shipments to obtain key supplies since January.

If labor disruptions continue, businesses may reconsider their reliance on shipping to the West Coast, said Mark Vitner, a senior economist at Wells Fargo.

“The longer we have disruptions at the ports, the more and more people say this is a reason to do business elsewhere,” he said.

An extreme example of what could happen came Tuesday, when South Korea’s largest shipping company, Hanjin, announced it was pulling out of the Port of Portland.

The shipper accounted for 78% of business at the port, according to the Oregonian newspaper, importing apparel for companies such as Nike and exporting apples and other crops.

Just last weekend, a Hanjin ship sat for four days without being unloaded amid walkouts and lockouts.

Another looming threat is the widening of the Panama Canal, which will allow much larger cargo ships to head directly to the Gulf and East coasts, where ports are racing to expand. That business now mostly flows to L.A. and Long Beach.

With the canal project scheduled for completion next year, this is a bad time for the West Coast to give “themselves a bad name in terms of reliability,” said Jock O’Connell, an international trade economist.

For now, the unions have a strong hand.

While globalization has hurt unions in many U.S. industries, it’s had the opposite effect at West Coast ports. Surging trade with Asia has nearly tripled traffic at the ports of L.A. and Long Beach over the last 20 years and given dockworkers here ever more clout.

Today, the dockworkers are among the best-paid blue-collar workers in the country, earning between $26 and $41 an hour. And their union — tied not to the fate of any one company but to a whole network of international trade — has been able to play hardball.

“These 20,000 workers occupy one of the central choke points of the entire U.S. economy,” said Harley Shaiken, a UC Berkeley professor who specializes in labor unions. “That gives them enormous power.”

It will be up to Perez and a federal mediator to craft a deal that satisfies the dockworkers, the shipping companies and the many industries watching the talks.

If an agreement comes in the next week, the aftershocks will be “a blip,” said Winer, the Wedbush managing director. But if it drags longer, the situation could be dire, he said.

“Six months would be a horror show,” he said. “Even if this lasts more than a month, it’s going to be a significant issue.”

Ken Coons | SeafoodNews.com | Read original article here.

Elephant Seals Battle for Love With Mating Songs and Bravado

Lauren Sommer, KQED Science

Editor’s Note: This story won a national Edward R. Murrow Award last year for Use of Sound. We bring it back to you as our Valentine from KQED Science. 

A male northern elephant seal calling at Año Nuevo State Reserve. (A. Friendlaender)

Love is in the air on California beaches this time of year, when northern elephant seals arrive by the thousands for breeding season. Males make plenty of noise at Año Nuevo State Reserve, north of Santa Cruz, but it sounds more like a chorus of motorcycles than the sultry sounds of Annie Lennox.

Now, researchers at UC Santa Cruz are decoding this complex communication system and learning how males use it to boost their reputation.

Elephant seals spend most of the year alone in the Pacific Ocean, so there’s plenty of action packed into the two months they’re on land every winter. “That’s mating behavior,” says naturalist Lisa Wolfklain, pointing at two elephant seals in a sea of hundreds of males, females and pups.

Male elephant seals are the size of an SUV — fifteen feet long and 4,000 pounds. They’re known for their proboscis, the huge, fleshy nose that hangs over their mouth. There are plenty of available females this time of year, but most males will strike out. The dating scene is controlled by alpha males.

“The alpha strategy is to be dominant over a group of females, the harem,” says Wolfklain. “And they want to have the first right to mate.”

You can spot the alpha males right in the middle of their groups of 10 to 100 females. The other males, known as betas, are on the outskirts, just watching, waiting for their chance.

“So this guy’s coming in,” says Wolfklain, pointing at one beta male moving quickly toward a female. The alpha male perks up and snorts a warning with customary bravado. Sometimes the fight ends there, but not this one.

“Ooh, now they’re hitting with their heads,” the commentary continues, as the two lunge at each others’ chests. A few strikes seem to be enough for the beta male and he retreats.

These fights can be bloody and all the while, other males are taking advantage and sneaking in. It adds up to a very stressful time for male elephant seals.

It’s All About Reputation

“It’s not advantageous for males to fight all the time,” says Caroline Casey, a researcher at UC Santa Cruz. She says fights can be risky. “Sometimes they can result in death and we’ve seen that,” she says.

Elephant seals also don’t eat while on land, so they need to conserve energy. Casey says, as with humans, one way to avoid fighting is communication. But until now, no one was really sure what the males were saying to each other. So, she and her colleagues have been studying a patch of beach with about 50 males.

“We have come up with this ranking system where we assign each male a score,” she says. It’s similar to systems used in professional sports, where the males win or lose points with every fight. Casey and her team also recorded the males’ calls and found remarkable differences.

One beta male, X579, has a call that ends in a flourish. “His call, to me, is my favorite,” she says. “He always has this really lovely note at the end of it.”

X579 was a beta male with a lot of competition. “He tends to vocalize and challenge everybody right when he gets there,” Casey says. He challenged GL, an alpha male with a very short, staccato call.

“That is what’s so incredible,” Casey says. “All of the animals sound completely different from one another.” What’s more, Casey’s team found that each male seems to use the same call year after year, whether he has a harem or not. It’s their signature call – and they flaunt it.

“A larger, more dominant animal will come up to a smaller animal, maybe beat him up a little bit,” says Casey, “call at him before and after, like, ‘Hey, this is me. I’m Bob. Don’t mess with me.’”

It’s all about spreading your reputation around. “That’s called associative learning and that’s very unique among marine mammals,” Casey explains. “That means that every male has the potential to be learning every other male based on their acoustic signature at that site.”

These complex communication systems have been studied in songbirds and other animals, but Casey says less is known about marine species. “I think it’s just a piece of larger puzzle in understanding how these animals breed and how they’re going to survive.”

A century ago, elephant seals were hunted to near extinction for their blubber. Fewer than 100 lingered off the coast of Mexico. With protective laws in place, today there are more than 150,000 northern elephant seals — and growing.

That’s good news for Casey’s loner elephant seal X579. This year, he’s an alpha male for the first time. As for the others, there’s always next year.

Read the original post here.

Hitch in North Coast marine sanctuary plans delays unveiling

Thousands of fiery red crabs wash ashore in Newport Beach

A pelagic red crab encounters a seashell on Balboa Island on Wednesday morning after thousands of the tiny crustaceans came ashore with the high tide. (Don Leach / Daily Pilot)

Drawn north by warm ocean waters, thousands of candy-red crabs rarely seen in coastal Southern California have washed ashore in Newport Beach.

The tiny red pelagic crabs came ashore with the high tide this week, scampering across the sands, bobbing in the shallow waters and adding a splash of color to the beachfront.

“They look like baby lobsters,” said Kevin Kramp, a Balboa Island resident who spotted a cluster of the crustaceans relaxing in the shade of a dock. “Someone get the butter.”

The crabs, known as Pleuroncodes planipes, are about 4 inches long, have three small legs on each side of their bodies and two pincers in front, much like a miniature lobster. Their tails are segmented, causing them to swim backward.

The crabs more often inhabit the warm waters along the lower west coast of Baja California, experts say, and are believed to spend the majority of the year hiding on sandy ocean bottoms.

However, during the spring, the crabs travel in dense schools and occasionally wash ashore, said Southern California Marine Institute director Daniel Pondella II.

But this marks the first time in years that Pondella has heard of them being seen in Southern California.

“This is the first warm year we’ve had in quite awhile,” he said. “It could just be a sign of the warm water we’re currently experiencing.”

Some experts estimate that warm southern currents may distribute the crabs into Southern California every six to 10 years.

A thick blanket of the fiery red crabs surfaced in the late ’90s, and again several years later in the Channel Islands and oceanographers at the time saw them as a possible indicator of an advancing El Nino weather pattern.

Their arrival puts them in league with other nonnative animals seen off the Southern California coast in recent years, such as blue marlin, whale sharks, wahoo, yellowfin tuna, manta rays and by-the-wind sailors – a blob-likejellyfish that skims along the surface of the ocean.

Newport Beach resident Darren Zinter initially thought the crabs were tiny frogs because of how close they were swimming to the surface of the water. Zinter grabbed one to get a closer look before setting it free.

“I’ve never seen these things before,” Zinter said. “It’s incredible.”

Original story: Hannah Fry | http://www.latimes.com/local/lanow/la-me-ln-red-crabs-newport-beach-20150122-story.html

Official unveiling next week for North Coast marine sanctuary expansion

Kamilah Motley of Washington, D.C. takes in the sweeping view of the Sonoma Coast, north of Bodega Bay, Monday Jan. 20, 2015. The unveiling of the expanded Cordell Bank and Gulf of the Farallones National Marine Sanctuaries will take place next week. (Kent Porter / Press Democrat) 2015

Last-minute consultations were underway in Washington this week in advance of the expected publication Tuesday of final plans for expansion of two adjoining national marine sanctuaries off the North Coast.

Reports of a few lingering operational questions on the part of Coast Guard officials should not impede implementation of long-sought protections for the swath of wildlife-rich waters offshore of Sonoma County, federal sanctuary personnel said.

“So far, the information I have is we are not anticipating any delays,” said Maria Brown, superintendent of the Gulf of the Farallones National Marine Sanctuary.

The proposed move, announced by the Obama administration in December 2012, will more than double the size of the combined Cordell Bank and Gulf of the Farallones National Marine Sanctuaries, extending federal protections north along the Sonoma Coast to Point Arena in southern Mendocino County.

The action will fulfill a four-decade quest to ban energy and mineral exploration and extraction off that stretch of coastline, extending federal protection to an additional 2,769 square miles of ocean.

The final rule on the expansion is expected to be published in the Federal Register on Tuesday, Jan. 27, triggering a 45-day review by Congress and California Gov. Jerry Brown before the area is officially included in sanctuary boundaries. Sanctuary officials earlier had said the rule would be published Jan. 20.

Matt Stout, communications director for the National Marine Sanctuary System, said the expansion is the agency’s largest undertaking of its kind short of creating a new sanctuary. But he said strong support for the plan among lawmakers suggested smooth sailing ahead.

“This expansion has grown out of the will of Congress to see something happen here,” Stout said. “We’ve had nothing but absolutely fantastic support from all members of Congress. And the local delegation is incredibly vocal and supportive, so we wouldn’t anticipate any challenge.”

You can reach Staff Writer Mary Callahan at 521-5249 or mary.callahan@pressdemocrat.com. On Twitter @MaryCallahanB.

Read original story: The Press Democrat

California drought could end with storms known as atmospheric rivers

California’s drought crept in slowly, but it could end with a torrent of winter storms that stream across the Pacific, dumping much of the year’s rain and snow in a few fast-moving and potentially catastrophic downpours.

Powerful storms known as atmospheric rivers, ribbons of water vapor that extend for thousands of miles, pulling moisture from the tropics and delivering it to the West Coast, have broken 40% of California droughts since 1950, recent research shows.

“These atmospheric rivers — their absence or their presence — really determine whether California is in drought or not and whether floods are going to occur,” said F. Martin Ralph, a research meteorologist who directs the Center for Western Weather and Water Extremes at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography at UC San Diego.

The storms, which flow like massive rivers in the sky, can carry 15 times as much water as the Mississippi and deliver up to half of the state’s annual precipitation between December and February, scientists say. Though atmospheric rivers are unlikely to end California’s drought this year, if they bring enough rain to erase the state’s huge precipitation deficit, they could wreak havoc by unleashing floods and landslides.

Scientists using a new type of satellite data discovered atmospheric rivers in the 1990s, and studies since then have revealed the phenomenon’s strong influence on California’s water supply and extreme weather.

This month, a group of government and university scientists, including Ralph, are launching a major field experiment to better understand atmospheric rivers as they develop over the Pacific. Through the end of February, some researchers will fly airplanes above storms as they pass through, while others will monitor them from ships hundreds of miles off California. As the storms make landfall, the scientists will collect data with ground-based instruments.

“We’re going to measure the heck out of them,” Ralph said.

Scientists will use the information to try to improve atmospheric river forecasts, including where they will hit hardest and for how long. That could help communities prepare for flooding and allow water managers to make better use of storm runoff.

These atmospheric rivers — their absence or their presence — really determine whether California is in drought or not and whether floods are going to occur.- F. Martin Ralph, a research meteorologist who directs the Center for Western Weather and Water Extremes at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography at UC San Diego.

California usually needs about five good atmospheric rivers each winter to fill reservoirs, stimulate spring vegetation growth and build snowpack to healthy levels, said Michael Anderson, a climatologist for the California Department of Water Resources. But how much the storms boost the state’s water supply depends on the characteristics of each one, including how cold it is, whether it makes landfall toward the north or south, and whether the precipitation falls mostly as rain near the coast or as snow in the mountains.

Jay Jasperse, chief engineer for the Sonoma County Water Agency, calls atmospheric rivers “our water supply up in the air.” The agency, which operates two reservoirs in the Russian River Valley, one of the state’s most flood-prone watersheds, has been seeking more precise forecasts to make better decisions about releasing water from reservoirs to accommodate storm runoff or conserving it to use as drinking water.

“We want to better handle these short, intense rainfall events,” Jasperse said.

If atmospheric rivers fail to arrive, California could be in serious trouble. That’s what happened last winter, when a ridge of high pressure lingered off the West Coast for months, blocking storms and intensifying the drought.

An atmospheric river broke through last February but didn’t bring enough rain to make a big improvement. In December, a strong atmospheric river drenched Northern California, but much of it fell as rain near the coast rather than snow in the mountains. That means the state will need several more big storms by the end of next month to build up its snowpack, which in the Sierra Nevada remains at less than half of normal.

As much as Californians might hope for a series of atmospheric rivers to sweep in and end the three-year drought, experts warn that so much rain at once could bring devastation.

California’s most severe storm event on record was caused by a series of atmospheric rivers that began in December 1861 and poured rain for weeks. The storms caused such extensive flooding in the Central Valley that the state Capitol was temporarily moved from Sacramento to San Francisco.

Ten years ago, an atmospheric river brought record-setting rain to Southern California, causing a mudslide that killed 10 people in the Ventura County beach town of La Conchita.

Atmospheric rivers are expected to grow stronger over the century as global warming increases the amount of water vapor that can be lifted out of tropical oceans and pushed to higher latitudes.

A 2011 simulation by the U.S. Geological Survey found that a hypothetical megastorm — an atmospheric river event so strong it happens only once every 100 to 200 years — could be more catastrophic than a major earthquake, over several weeks bringing 10 feet of rain and hurricane-force winds, widespread flooding, landslides and $300 billion in property damage.

Dale Cox, a USGS project manager who oversaw the disaster scenario, said atmospheric rivers “provide us water, but they are also a major source of our calamity.”

“Everybody’s hoping for them,” he said, “but we don’t want too many.”

tony.barboza@latimes.com

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