Hopeful Californians are looking to the Pacific this winter for an end to California’s most punishing drought on record.
The reason: what appears to be a monster El Niño in the making. The abnormally warm waters along the equator could mean a wet winter.
There are no guarantees, but there have been portents. On one Saturday in July, San Diego got more rain than it got the entire month of January.
That same month, ESPN broadcaster Dan Shulman broke the news to baseball fans from underneath a golf umbrella: “For the first time in 20 years, a game has been postponed because of rain here in Anaheim.”
You can thank Dolores for that, a hurricane that managed to make it farther north than normal. The intense Pacific hurricane season bears the fingerprints of El Niño, which is already getting hyped as a potential drought-buster.
“For this time of year, the El Niño is as strong as it’s ever been.”
Storms headed for the California coast run into the Ridiculously Resilient Ridge, represented by the “H” in this graphic. (David Pierce/ KQED)
Strength in this case is measured by how much warmer surface temperatures are than normal, in the tropical Pacific. And this one looks to be about as strong as the legendary El Niño of 1997-98, which was the strongest on record, peaking at about 2.3 degrees Celsius above normal.
In the ocean, a spike of more than two degrees is like sticking a hot poker into the climate system. Pacific storms sucked up moisture from extremely warm equatorial waters and pretty much dumped it on California. San Francisco got double its normal rainfall that year.
Enter the Blob
But this time around, there are other things brewing in the Pacific: patches of freakishly warm water spread far and wide, up the California coast to the persistently warm vortex, hundreds of miles across, christened by climate scientists as “the Blob.”
“That is definitely the wildcard with this El Niño,” warns Bill Patzert, a climatologist at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Lab in Pasadena and an advisor to federal El Niño forecasters.
He says unlike in 1997, the Blob has been a fixture during the current drought. It’s essentially the sidekick of that “Ridiculously Resilient Ridge,” the stubborn bubble of high-pressure that’s been parked off the north coast for the past couple of years, diverting winter storms up and around California.
The “Blob” is associated with the persistent ridge of high pressure that has detoured the winter storm track around California. (NOAA)
“And so the question is, who wins in the battle of the Blob and the El Niño,” says Patzert, “and what impact that’ll have on rainfall on the West Coast of the U.S. this fall, into the winter.”
Patzert says if the Blob and its ridge dominate, we could wring less water out of this El Niño.
“What we’re having here is battling blobs!”
But not everyone’s on the edge of their seat.
“It doesn’t fit with my concept of how things work,” says Trenberth. On the contrary, he maintains, the presence of all this warm water — especially close to the coast — could mean heavier rains from the storms we do get.
A Mixed Blessing
“The potential in California for rains to be torrential this winter is quite high because of the warm water,” Trenberth says.
That’s because, as a general rule, the warmer the water, the more moisture gets picked up by the atmosphere and by any emerging storms.
Ocean waters near California have warmed further in recent weeks, and remain far above normal. (NOAA RTG)
“Those storms are apt to pick up moisture from any warm water that’s lying around all along the West Coast,” says Trenberth, “and it just feeds those storms.”
That would be both good and bad news. While the reservoirs refill, the rivers could easily overfill, causing flooding and landslides — much like in 1997-98. Trenberth will take that glass as half-full.
“The way things are shaping up it sure looks like an end to the drought to me,” he says, “depending on how you define the drought.”
Patzert agrees the current El Niño is looking like a monster — “Godzilla,” to use his favorite moniker. But he’s concerned the Blob and its ridge could become at least partial spoilers, blocking out storms from the northern Pacific, leaving the door open only for El Niño-driven storms from the tropics.
That could mean Southern California gets a soaking, but the northern part of the state — where most of the major reservoirs are — misses out.
“There is almost certainly going to be a dividing line,” says Stanford climate scientist Daniel Swain. “And it’s possible that dividing line could occur somewhere in Northern California.”
Patzert hopes that isn’t the case.
“If that happens, I’m definitely going to have to go into witness protection,” he frets, “because ‘my’ El Niño, the Great Wet Hope, will only deliver half the package.”
Whatever we get, it’s a package that won’t be delivered for at least three months, when California’s long-awaited “rainy” season is due.
Permalink | Categories Breaking News on August 11, 2015 by FishingNews | Comments Off on Possible Spoiler for El Niño: A ‘Battle of the Blobs’ Tags: Blob, El Nino
Walruses, like these in Alaska, are being forced ashore in record numbers. Corey Accardo/NOAA/AP
The worst predicted impacts of climate change are starting to happen — and much faster than climate scientists expected
Historians may look to 2015 as the year when shit really started hitting the fan. Some snapshots: In just the past few months, record-setting heat waves in Pakistan and India each killed more than 1,000 people. In Washington state’s Olympic National Park, the rainforest caught fire for the first time in living memory. London reached 98 degrees Fahrenheit during the hottest July day ever recorded in the U.K.; The Guardian briefly had to pause its live blog of the heat wave because its computer servers overheated. In California, suffering from its worst drought in a millennium, a 50-acre brush fire swelled seventyfold in a matter of hours, jumping across the I-15 freeway during rush-hour traffic. Then, a few days later, the region was pounded by intense, virtually unheard-of summer rains. Puerto Rico is under its strictest water rationing in history as a monster El Niño forms in the tropical Pacific Ocean, shifting weather patterns worldwide.
On July 20th, James Hansen, the former NASA climatologist who brought climate change to the public’s attention in the summer of 1988, issued a bombshell: He and a team of climate scientists had identified a newly important feedback mechanism off the coast of Antarctica that suggests mean sea levels could rise 10 times faster than previously predicted: 10 feet by 2065. The authors included this chilling warning: If emissions aren’t cut, “We conclude that multi-meter sea-level rise would become practically unavoidable. Social disruption and economic consequences of such large sea-level rise could be devastating. It is not difficult to imagine that conflicts arising from forced migrations and economic collapse might make the planet ungovernable, threatening the fabric of civilization.”
Eric Rignot, a climate scientist at NASA and the University of California-Irvine and a co-author on Hansen’s study, said their new research doesn’t necessarily change the worst-case scenario on sea-level rise, it just makes it much more pressing to think about and discuss, especially among world leaders. In particular, says Rignot, the new research shows a two-degree Celsius rise in global temperature — the previously agreed upon “safe” level of climate change — “would be a catastrophe for sea-level rise.”
Hansen’s new study also shows how complicated and unpredictable climate change can be. Even as global ocean temperatures rise to their highest levels in recorded history, some parts of the ocean, near where ice is melting exceptionally fast, are actually cooling, slowing ocean circulation currents and sending weather patterns into a frenzy. Sure enough, a persistently cold patch of ocean is starting to show up just south of Greenland, exactly where previous experimental predictions of a sudden surge of freshwater from melting ice expected it to be. Michael Mann, another prominent climate scientist, recently said of the unexpectedly sudden Atlantic slowdown, “This is yet another example of where observations suggest that climate model predictions may be too conservative when it comes to the pace at which certain aspects of climate change are proceeding.”
Since storm systems and jet streams in the United States and Europe partially draw their energy from the difference in ocean temperatures, the implication of one patch of ocean cooling while the rest of the ocean warms is profound. Storms will get stronger, and sea-level rise will accelerate. Scientists like Hansen only expect extreme weather to get worse in the years to come, though Mann said it was still “unclear” whether recent severe winters on the East Coast are connected to the phenomenon.
And yet, these aren’t even the most disturbing changes happening to the Earth’s biosphere that climate scientists are discovering this year. For that, you have to look not at the rising sea levels but to what is actually happening within the oceans themselves.
Water temperatures this year in the North Pacific have never been this high for this long over such a large area — and it is already having a profound effect on marine life
Eighty-year-old Roger Thomas runs whale-watching trips out of San Francisco. On an excursion earlier this year, Thomas spotted 25 humpbacks and three blue whales. During a survey on July 4th, federal officials spotted 115 whales in a single hour near the Farallon Islands — enough to issue a boating warning. Humpbacks are occasionally seen offshore in California, but rarely so close to the coast or in such numbers. Why are they coming so close to shore? Exceptionally warm water has concentrated the krill and anchovies they feed on into a narrow band of relatively cool coastal water. The whales are having a heyday. “It’s unbelievable,” Thomas told a local paper. “Whales are all over the place.”
Last fall, in northern Alaska, in the same part of the Arctic where Shell is planning to drill for oil, federal scientists discovered 35,000 walruses congregating on a single beach. It was the largest-ever documented “haul out” of walruses, and a sign that sea ice, their favored habitat, is becoming harder and harder to find.
Marine life is moving north, adapting in real time to the warming ocean. Great white sharks have been sighted breeding near Monterey Bay, California, the farthest north that’s ever been known to occur. A blue marlin was caught last summer near Catalina Island — 1,000 miles north of its typical range. Across California, there have been sightings of non-native animals moving north, such as Mexican red crabs.
Salmon on the brink of dying out. Michael Quinton/Newscom
No species may be as uniquely endangered as the one most associated with the Pacific Northwest, the salmon. Every two weeks, Bill Peterson, an oceanographer and senior scientist at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s Northwest Fisheries Science Center in Oregon, takes to the sea to collect data he uses to forecast the return of salmon. What he’s been seeing this year is deeply troubling.Salmon are crucial to their coastal ecosystem like perhaps few other species on the planet. A significant portion of the nitrogen in West Coast forests has been traced back to salmon, which can travel hundreds of miles upstream to lay their eggs. The largest trees on Earth simply wouldn’t exist without salmon.But their situation is precarious. This year, officials in California are bringing salmon downstream in convoys of trucks, because river levels are too low and the temperatures too warm for them to have a reasonable chance of surviving. One species, the winter-run Chinook salmon, is at a particularly increased risk of decline in the next few years, should the warm water persist offshore.”You talk to fishermen, and they all say: ‘We’ve never seen anything like this before,’ ” says Peterson. “So when you have no experience with something like this, it gets like, ‘What the hell’s going on?’ ”
Atmospheric scientists increasingly believe that the exceptionally warm waters over the past months are the early indications of a phase shift in the Pacific Decadal Oscillation, a cyclical warming of the North Pacific that happens a few times each century. Positive phases of the PDO have been known to last for 15 to 20 years, during which global warming can increase at double the rate as during negative phases of the PDO. It also makes big El Niños, like this year’s, more likely. The nature of PDO phase shifts is unpredictable — climate scientists simply haven’t yet figured out precisely what’s behind them and why they happen when they do. It’s not a permanent change — the ocean’s temperature will likely drop from these record highs, at least temporarily, some time over the next few years — but the impact on marine species will be lasting, and scientists have pointed to the PDO as a global-warming preview.
“The climate [change] models predict this gentle, slow increase in temperature,” says Peterson, “but the main problem we’ve had for the last few years is the variability is so high. As scientists, we can’t keep up with it, and neither can the animals.” Peterson likens it to a boxer getting pummeled round after round: “At some point, you knock them down, and the fight is over.”
Pavement-melting heat waves in India. Harish Tyagi/EPA/Corbis
Attendant with this weird wildlife behavior is a stunning drop in the number of plankton — the basis of the ocean’s food chain. In July, another major study concluded that acidifying oceans are likely to have a “quite traumatic” impact on plankton diversity, with some species dying out while others flourish. As the oceans absorb carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, it’s converted into carbonic acid — and the pH of seawater declines. According to lead author Stephanie Dutkiewicz of MIT, that trend means “the whole food chain is going to be different.”
The Hansen study may have gotten more attention, but the Dutkiewicz study, and others like it, could have even more dire implications for our future. The rapid changes Dutkiewicz and her colleagues are observing have shocked some of their fellow scientists into thinking that yes, actually, we’re heading toward the worst-case scenario. Unlike a prediction of massive sea-level rise just decades away, the warming and acidifying oceans represent a problem that seems to have kick-started a mass extinction on the same time scale.
Jacquelyn Gill is a paleoecologist at the University of Maine. She knows a lot about extinction, and her work is more relevant than ever. Essentially, she’s trying to save the species that are alive right now by learning more about what killed off the ones that aren’t. The ancient data she studies shows “really compelling evidence that there can be events of abrupt climate change that can happen well within human life spans. We’re talking less than a decade.”
For the past year or two, a persistent change in winds over the North Pacific has given rise to what meteorologists and oceanographers are calling “the blob” — a highly anomalous patch of warm water between Hawaii, Alaska and Baja California that’s thrown the marine ecosystem into a tailspin. Amid warmer temperatures, plankton numbers have plummeted, and the myriad species that depend on them have migrated or seen their own numbers dwindle.
Significant northward surges of warm water have happened before, even frequently. El Niño, for example, does this on a predictable basis. But what’s happening this year appears to be something new. Some climate scientists think that the wind shift is linked to the rapid decline in Arctic sea ice over the past few years, which separate research has shown makes weather patterns more likely to get stuck.
A similar shift in the behavior of the jet stream has also contributed to the California drought and severe polar vortex winters in the Northeast over the past two years. An amplified jet-stream pattern has produced an unusual doldrum off the West Coast that’s persisted for most of the past 18 months. Daniel Swain, a Stanford University meteorologist, has called it the “Ridiculously Resilient Ridge” — weather patterns just aren’t supposed to last this long.
What’s increasingly uncontroversial among scientists is that in many ecosystems, the impacts of the current off-the-charts temperatures in the North Pacific will linger for years, or longer. The largest ocean on Earth, the Pacific is exhibiting cyclical variability to greater extremes than other ocean basins. While the North Pacific is currently the most dramatic area of change in the world’s oceans, it’s not alone: Globally, 2014 was a record-setting year for ocean temperatures, and 2015 is on pace to beat it soundly, boosted by the El Niño in the Pacific. Six percent of the world’s reefs could disappear before the end of the decade, perhaps permanently, thanks to warming waters.
Since warmer oceans expand in volume, it’s also leading to a surge in sea-level rise. One recent study showed a slowdown in Atlantic Ocean currents, perhaps linked to glacial melt from Greenland, that caused a four-inch rise in sea levels along the Northeast coast in just two years, from 2009 to 2010. To be sure, it seems like this sudden and unpredicted surge was only temporary, but scientists who studied the surge estimated it to be a 1-in-850-year event, and it’s been blamed on accelerated beach erosion “almost as significant as some hurricane events.”
Biblical floods in Turkey. Ali Atmaca/Anadolu Agency/Getty
Possibly worse than rising ocean temperatures is the acidification of the waters. Acidification has a direct effect on mollusks and other marine animals with hard outer bodies: A striking study last year showed that, along the West Coast, the shells of tiny snails are already dissolving, with as-yet-unknown consequences on the ecosystem. One of the study’s authors, Nina Bednaršek, told Science magazine that the snails’ shells, pitted by the acidifying ocean, resembled “cauliflower” or “sandpaper.” A similarly striking study by more than a dozen of the world’s top ocean scientists this July said that the current pace of increasing carbon emissions would force an “effectively irreversible” change on ocean ecosystems during this century. In as little as a decade, the study suggested, chemical changes will rise significantly above background levels in nearly half of the world’s oceans.
“I used to think it was kind of hard to make things in the ocean go extinct,” James Barry of the Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute in California told the Seattle Times in 2013. “But this change we’re seeing is happening so fast it’s almost instantaneous.”
Thanks to the pressure we’re putting on the planet’s ecosystem — warming, acidification and good old-fashioned pollution — the oceans are set up for several decades of rapid change. Here’s what could happen next.
The combination of excessive nutrients from agricultural runoff, abnormal wind patterns and the warming oceans is already creating seasonal dead zones in coastal regions when algae blooms suck up most of the available oxygen. The appearance of low-oxygen regions has doubled in frequency every 10 years since 1960 and should continue to grow over the coming decades at an even greater rate.
So far, dead zones have remained mostly close to the coasts, but in the 21st century, deep-ocean dead zones could become common. These low-oxygen regions could gradually expand in size — potentially thousands of miles across — which would force fish, whales, pretty much everything upward. If this were to occur, large sections of the temperate deep oceans would suffer should the oxygen-free layer grow so pronounced that it stratifies, pushing surface ocean warming into overdrive and hindering upwelling of cooler, nutrient-rich deeper water.
Enhanced evaporation from the warmer oceans will create heavier downpours, perhaps destabilizing the root systems of forests, and accelerated runoff will pour more excess nutrients into coastal areas, further enhancing dead zones. In the past year, downpours have broken records in Long Island, Phoenix, Detroit, Baltimore, Houston and Pensacola, Florida.
Evidence for the above scenario comes in large part from our best understanding of what happened 250 million years ago, during the “Great Dying,” when more than 90 percent of all oceanic species perished after a pulse of carbon dioxide and methane from land-based sources began a period of profound climate change. The conditions that triggered “Great Dying” took hundreds of thousands of years to develop. But humans have been emitting carbon dioxide at a much quicker rate, so the current mass extinction only took 100 years or so to kick-start.
With all these stressors working against it, a hypoxic feedback loop could wind up destroying some of the oceans’ most species-rich ecosystems within our lifetime. A recent study by Sarah Moffitt of the University of California-Davis said it could take the ocean thousands of years to recover. “Looking forward for my kid, people in the future are not going to have the same ocean that I have today,” Moffitt said.
As you might expect, having tickets to the front row of a global environmental catastrophe is taking an increasingly emotional toll on scientists, and in some cases pushing them toward advocacy. Of the two dozen or so scientists I interviewed for this piece, virtually all drifted into apocalyptic language at some point.
For Simone Alin, an oceanographer focusing on ocean acidification at NOAA’s Pacific Marine Environmental Laboratory in Seattle, the changes she’s seeing hit close to home. The Puget Sound is a natural laboratory for the coming decades of rapid change because its waters are naturally more acidified than most of the world’s marine ecosystems.
The local oyster industry here is already seeing serious impacts from acidifying waters and is going to great lengths to avoid a total collapse. Alin calls oysters, which are non-native, the canary in the coal mine for the Puget Sound: “A canary is also not native to a coal mine, but that doesn’t mean it’s not a good indicator of change.”
Though she works on fundamental oceanic changes every day, the Dutkiewicz study on the impending large-scale changes to plankton caught her off-guard: “This was alarming to me because if the basis of the food web changes, then . . . everything could change, right?”
Alin’s frank discussion of the looming oceanic apocalypse is perhaps a product of studying unfathomable change every day. But four years ago, the birth of her twins “heightened the whole issue,” she says. “I was worried enough about these problems before having kids that I maybe wondered whether it was a good idea. Now, it just makes me feel crushed.”
Katharine Hayhoe, a climate scientist and evangelical Christian, moved from Canada to Texas with her husband, a pastor, precisely because of its vulnerability to climate change. There, she engages with the evangelical community on science — almost as a missionary would. But she’s already planning her exit strategy: “If we continue on our current pathway, Canada will be home for us long term. But the majority of people don’t have an exit strategy. . . . So that’s who I’m here trying to help.”
James Hansen, the dean of climate scientists, retired from NASA in 2013 to become a climate activist. But for all the gloom of the report he just put his name to, Hansen is actually somewhat hopeful. That’s because he knows that climate change has a straightforward solution: End fossil-fuel use as quickly as possible. If tomorrow, the leaders of the United States and China would agree to a sufficiently strong, coordinated carbon tax that’s also applied to imports, the rest of the world would have no choice but to sign up. This idea has already been pitched to Congress several times, with tepid bipartisan support. Even though a carbon tax is probably a long shot, for Hansen, even the slim possibility that bold action like this might happen is enough for him to devote the rest of his life to working to achieve it. On a conference call with reporters in July, Hansen said a potential joint U.S.-China carbon tax is more important than whatever happens at the United Nations climate talks in Paris.
One group Hansen is helping is Our Children’s Trust, a legal advocacy organization that’s filed a number of novel challenges on behalf of minors under the idea that climate change is a violation of intergenerational equity — children, the group argues, are lawfully entitled to inherit a healthy planet.
A separate challenge to U.S. law is being brought by a former EPA scientist arguing that carbon dioxide isn’t just a pollutant (which, under the Clean Air Act, can dissipate on its own), it’s also a toxic substance. In general, these substances have exceptionally long life spans in the environment, cause an unreasonable risk, and therefore require remediation. In this case, remediation may involve planting vast numbers of trees or restoring wetlands to bury excess carbon underground.
Even if these novel challenges succeed, it will take years before a bend in the curve is noticeable. But maybe that’s enough. When all feels lost, saving a few species will feel like a triumph.
Research by Rebecca Asch, a recent graduate of Scripps Institution of Oceanography at UC San Diego, shows a strong correlation between warmer ocean temperatures and changes in the timing of fish reproduction.
Climate variability has changed the seasonal cycle of larvae production by fishes in the California Current. Such shifts in seasonal, biological processes are known as phenology. Changes in phenology are studied by scientists as a key way to assess the effects of climate change on a species.
There have been extensive studies on the phenology of terrestrial (land) species, but comparatively few studies on how climate variability affects seasonal behavior of marine species. Existing studies indicate that changes in seasonal cycles are occurring earlier in most terrestrial ecosystems. Climate change may cause the phenology of marine animals to change more rapidly than terrestrial species.
Unseasonably warm ocean temperatures may also affect migration patterns, bringing several marine species usually found in regions closer to the Equator closer to Southern California. In February, a pod of false killer whales were seen from the Scripps Pier; this was the first time these whales have been seen north of central Baja California.
Asch studied the larval stages of 43 fish species that were collected off the Southern California coast between 1951 and 2008. The research used the larval fishes from the California Cooperative Oceanic Fisheries Investigations (CalCOFI), a unique data set that has been consistently collected and maintained for over 60 years; it is among the oldest and most complete datasets of its type.
The data showed that many fish species spawned earlier, other species showed no long-term change in spawning cycles, and a few species spawned later. Many of the species with no long-term changes in spawning show variations in spawning between years, indicating that the changes in their spawning cycles may have occurred due to factors other than climate change, such as naturally occurring climate variability.
Asch’s findings may also be useful for fisheries management. “The fishes are reacting to climate change and it will be important for any fisheries management with a seasonal component to adapt their practices to avoid mismanagement,” she said.
The Southern California Current is an example of an Eastern Boundary Current Upwelling (EBCU) ecosystem. These ecosystems account for over twenty percent of global fish catch. If the California Current is representative of other EBCU ecosystems, similar changes in fish phenology to ones observed by Asch could be occurring around the world.
A change in the time of year when fish reproduce can affect their overall ecology. Generally, fish reproduce during seasons when there is an abundance of zooplankton and/or when upwelling is minimal. This behavior maximizes the survival of larvae and prevents larvae from being swept into unfavorable habitats by currents. Unlike fishes, zooplankton have not exhibited continuous changes in phenology over the 60-year period of the CalCOFI program. Over time, this “mismatch” between the seasonality of larvae and zooplankton could cause fish species to potentially spawn during less than ideal periods for larvae survival.
The study was funded by California Sea Grant, NOAA’s Nancy Foster Scholarship Program, NSF IGERT Grant, the San Diego ACRS Foundation, and the Nippon Foundation.
A breeding male bald eagle is shown landing at the west end on Santa Catalina Island, Calif. – P. Sharpe
“Doing very well! Thanks for checking,” the bald eagles of California’s Channel Islands might well say to recent inquiries by researchers about their well-being.
The iconic birds were erased from the Channel Islands completely in the 1960s thanks to hunters, egg collectors, and the poisoning of their environment by the insecticide DDT.
But they have been reintroduced to the islands over the last three 35 years, and scientists writing in the latest issue of the journal The Condor: Ornithological Applications wanted to compare the eagles’ modern diet with that of the historical eagle population. Understanding how a habitat has changed between disappearance and reintroduction, they stress, is critical to gauging a species’ chance of thriving in an ancestral location.
Seth Newsome, of the University of New Mexico; Paul Collins, of the Santa Barbara Museum of Natural History; and Peter Sharpe, of the Institute for Wildlife Studies authored the study.
In 2010 and 2011, the trio examined the diets of the eagles and found the animals were indeed thriving, albeit from different dietary staples.
In the northern islands, the researchers found the eagles were eating much as they had before disappearing: they were feasting on seabirds.
Meanwhile, on the more southerly Santa Catalina Island, the eagles were, it turned out, eating primarily fish.
“Generally speaking,” explained Newsome in a release, “the northern islands are much more pristine, and a larger fraction of their coastlines includes areas where fishing is strongly regulated or banned.”
But Santa Catalina, Newsome noted, “has a larger human footprint, especially in the form of recreational fishing.”
The team thinks the eagles on Santa Catalina have figured out that the wisest thing to do when hungry is to look for the humans in the boats. “We believe that the differences in diversity of fish consumed by eagles in these two areas is actually a product of recreational fishing, and that eagles on Santa Catalina have learned to follow recreational fishing boats and scavenge discards thrown overboard,” said Newsome.
While none of this thriving-on-seabirds news is terribly welcome if you’re a seabird, it nonetheless indicates something good. The researchers say the northern islands eagles’ abundant consumption of them shows that efforts to conserve seabirds in the area have been a boost to the whole ecosystem.
“Preserving diversity is wonderful,” Newsome said. “But you need to preserve diversity at all levels in the food chain. At present, such intact, fully-functioning food webs are relatively rare in the United States, but to see that happen in a place like the Channel Islands that is adjacent to an area with one of the highest human population densities in the U.S. (southern California) is exciting.”
These encouraging findings about the resurgent eagles come just days after news broke that the bald eagle population had expanded its reach to five of the eight Channel Islands, nesting on an island, San Clemente, that had not seen a nesting pair of bald eagles in more than half a century.
The water in the Monterey Bay, including off Marina State Beach, has been a turquoise color in the past few days because of the presence of coccolithophores, a single-celled phytoplankton that develops scales that reflect the sun. (Vern Fisher – Monterey Herald)
Monterey >> Our corner of the sea is turning a brighter shade of blue.
An odd and little-understood ocean phenomenon is taking place on Monterey Bay right now, and you may have noticed it: the waters are turning an almost tropical turquoise color. Derived from an abundance of a harmless microorganism, the colorful blooms are usually found in the open sea.
But Monterey Bay’s is the second bloom along the California coast in a month. It is due to the presence of coccolithophores, a single-celled phytoplankton that develops hubcap-shaped limestone scales that reflect the sun, turning the water pastel colored.
“The optics of the water when one gets coccolithophores blooms, it looks like this,” said Debora Iglesias-Rodriguez, a biological oceanographer with UC Santa Barbara, noting how odd it is to see a bloom along the shore. “This is really unusual.”
The organisms shed their scales in the water, with the phenomenon usually occurring in northern seas. When you have billions of them, they can impact huge stretches of the open sea, a visual that can be bizarre and stunning in its intensity.
“The blooms are so bright you have to wear sunglasses,” Iglesias-Rodriguez said.
In fact, coccolithophores are responsible for something most people are familiar with: the White Cliffs of Dover, along the English Channel. The striking white cliff faces were created from sediment filled with the organism’s discarded scales.
The first bloom showed up last month in the Santa Barbara Channel. Iglesias-Rodriguez said she is researching why it happened there, including whether the recent oil spill is a factor.
But late last week, it started showing up in Monterey Bay. Satellite data shows the waters from Point Pinos in the south to Natural Bridges State Beach in the north colored a vibrant hue.
Iglesias-Rodriguez is in touch with colleagues at the Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute in the hopes of comparing water samples. She said she can only find one unofficial record of the phenomenon occurring off Santa Barbara, dating to the 1990s.
“We are trying to figure out: Why now?” she said.
Coccolithophores seem to thrive when other phytoplankton cannot, particularly when marine phosphorous levels are low. They typically bloom in early summer.
“This would be the right time for them,” Iglesias-Rodriguez said.
This image from Saturday was created using data from NASA’s AQUA satellite, with help from biological oceanographer John Ryan at the Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute. The turquoise water is created by the presence of a microorganism. (Courtesy MBARI)
The warming of the oceans due to climate change is now unstoppable after record temperatures last year, bringing additional sea-level rise, and raising the risks of severe storms, US government climate scientists said on Thursday.
The annual State of the Climate in 2014 report, based on research from 413 scientists from 58 countries, found record warming on the surface and upper levels of the oceans, especially in the North Pacific, in line with earlier findings of 2014 as the hottest year on record.
Global sea-level also reached a record high, with the expansion of those warming waters, keeping pace with the 3.2 ± 0.4 mm per year trend in sea level growth over the past two decades, the report said.
Scientists said the consequences of those warmer ocean temperatures would be felt for centuries to come – even if there were immediate efforts to cut the carbon emissions fuelling changes in the oceans.
“I think of it more like a fly wheel or a freight train. It takes a big push to get it going but it is moving now and will contiue to move long after we continue to pushing it,” Greg Johnson, an oceanographer at Noaa’s Pacific Marine Environmental Laboratory, told a conference call with reporters.
“Even if we were to freeze greenhouse gases at current levels, the sea would actually continue to warm for centuries and millennia, and as they continue to warm and expand the sea levels will continue to rise,” Johnson said.
On the west coast of the US, freakishly warm temperatures in the Pacific – 4 or 5F above normal – were already producing warmer winters, as well as worsening drought conditions by melting the snowpack, he said.
The extra heat in the oceans was also contributing to more intense storms, Tom Karl, director of Noaa’s National Centers for Environmental Information, said.
The report underlined 2014 as a banner year for the climate, setting record or near record levels for temperature extremes, and loss of glaciers and sea ice, and reinforcing decades-old pattern to changes to the climate system.
Four independent data sets confirmed 2014 as the hottest year on record, with much of that heat driven by the warming of the oceans.
Globally 90% of the excess heat caused by the rise in greenhouse gas emissions is absorbed by the oceans.
More than 20 countries in Europe set new heat records, with Africa, Asia and Australia also experiencing near-record heat. The east coast of North America was the only region to experience cooler than average conditions.
Alaska experienced temperatures 18F warmer than average. Spring break-up came to the Arctic 20-30 days earlier than the 20th century average.
“The prognosis is to expect a continuation of what we have seen,” Karl said.
Permalink | Categories Breaking News on July 17, 2015 by FishingNews | Comments Off on Warming of Oceans Due to Climate Change is Unstoppable, Say US Scientists Tags: climate change, ocean warming
A humpback whale in full breach last Sunday near the Southeast Farallon Island — researchers stationed at the island counted 93 humpback whales, 21 blue whales and one fin whale in a single hour
In one magic hour Sunday, researchers stationed at the South Farallon Islands counted 93 humpback whales, 21 blue whales and one fin whale, according to Mary Jane Schramm of the Greater Farallones National Marine Sanctuary.
There hasn’t been anything like this verified in modern times.
In addition, onlookers at Land’s End saw eight to 10 humpbacks just a mile offshore — pectoral fin slapping, lob tailing and both singular and serial breaching, reported Nan Sincero of the Oceanic Society and field scout Paul Judge.
At the same time, on a whale-watching trip with the Oceanic Society on the Salty Lady out of San Francisco, Capt. Roger Thomas said he sighted 25 humpbacks and three blue whales, most within range of Southeast Farallon Island.
“It’s like an eating contest out there,” Schramm said.
A vast amount of krill has brought in the blue whales. Large schools of anchovies and mackerel have attracted the humpbacks.
“One blue can consume up to four tons of krill per day when in maximum feeding mode,” Schramm said. “That’s right now, apparently, and right here.”
Blue whales are the biggest air-breathing mammals on Earth. Often double the size of a bus, when they surge to the surface to feed, you might see them emerge with krill-loaded seawater gushing from their giant mouths.
Several factors explain their arrival. Last month, a strong wind out of the northwest pushed across the sea toward the Bay Area. Along with the wind came cold, deep, nutrient-rich water from the edges of the continental shelf, where it surged upward to the surface waters of the Gulf of the Farallones Sanctuary.
When sunlight penetrated that nutrient-rich water, it launched the marine food chain. The most obvious result from this major upwelling event is the abundance of krill. All the critters offshore, from nesting murres and puffins at the Farallones to salmon — and to blue whales — have been feasting.
The result is that there may be no better time to see a blue whale than now. Some avid wildlife watchers can go a lifetime without sighting a blue whale, and yet to say we would expect it on a trip this weekend is mind-boggling.
Yet big blue is not alone. Humpback whales, often about 50 feet and 40 tons — known for their spectacular jumps and pirouettes — also have arrived in high numbers.
With your boat in neutral, humpbacks often will approach as if to show off.
I’ve had them jump right alongside, splashing everyone on board. Another time, I watched a dozen humpbacks jump in half-spin pirouettes around us for an hour. In another encounter, a dozen humpbacks swam in a coordinated circle just ahead of us, blowing bubbles to create an underwater curtain and keep their feed encircled while they took turns diving and then lunge-feeding through the center of the circle.
Last year, in Monterey Bay, I paddled out 10 miles and had a humpback surface so close that it hit me with the spray from its blowhole.
The largest number of sightings in the past week have been by land-based researchers called “Point Blue.” This is the latest incarnation of the Point Reyes Bird Observatory, which contracts with the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service to maintain a presence on Southeast Farallon Island. They are deeply involved in seabird research, but their work includes one-hour daily snapshots, a part of larger efforts to prevent whale deaths from collisions with large vessels.
The second-highest number of sightings have been on whale-watching boats, such as the Salty Lady with the Oceanic Society. Thomas said captains have pinpointed the location of the blue whales, and in the process, many humpbacks have been sighted as well, plus a huge array of shorebirds attracted to the area by feed.
On land, the best sites to see whales at the mouth of the bay have been Lands End and lookouts along the coastal trail on the San Francisco Headlands, and at Point Bonita Lighthouse and cliff-top lookouts along the west end of Conzelman Road at the Marin Headlands.
“The humpbacks at the entrance to the bay have been hanging out for weeks,” Sincero said. “They are in heaven with all the food out there.
“There’s a young humpback I saw that loves to come up to the surface and curl its back, almost like Nessie (the Loch Ness Monster), and has been breaching quite a bit, too.”
It seems every week there is news of another landmark event along the coast. It’s becoming a golden era for the Greater Farallones Sanctuary.
Tom Stienstra’s Outdoor Report can be heard at 7:35 a.m., 9:35 a.m. and 12:35 p.m. Saturdays on KCBS (740 and 106.9). E-mail: tstienstra@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @StienstraTom
Purple blobs explained
At low tide this week on the Berkeley shoreline near Ashby Avenue, giant purple blobs covered half of the exposed beach, field scout Stephanie Manning reported.
They are sea slugs — formally called sea hares — from Baja, said Mary Jane Schramm of the Greater Farallones National Marine Sanctuary.
“The likelihood is that the die-off is the end stage of a mass-mating event,” Schramm said. “These seemingly ill-favored critters are quite the party animals.”
She said such seasonal mass events occur naturally all along the sea slug’s range to southern Mexico, often in remote, pristine areas.
The sea slugs have been washing up at Berkeley for about three weeks. Many believe their arrival in Bay Area waters, like that of the rookery of great white sharks two weeks ago in Monterey Bay near Santa Cruz, is a harbinger of the formation of an El Niño and a broad offshore warming of Pacific currents.
The El Nino climate pattern building in the Pacific is on track to be one of the strongest on record, with recent cyclones likely to intensify the event, the Bureau of Meteorology said.
Sea-surface temperatures in the central equatorial Pacific in June recorded the second largest anomalies on record for the month, behind only the June 1997 reading during the super 1997-98 El Nino event, the bureau said in its latest update.
Weekly sea-surface temperatures were also more than 1 degree above average for each of the regions monitored, their warmest sustained values since the 1997-98 event.
A string of tropical cyclones, including the rare July southern hemisphere storm, Cyclone Raquel, mean the El Nino will likely strengthen in coming weeks as “a strong reversal of trade winds” near the equator takes place.
“This is likely to increase temperatures below the surface of the tropical Pacific Ocean, which may in turn raise sea-surface temperatures further in the coming months,” the bureau said.
Unlike the last few El Ninos, the eastern Pacific is particularly warm, much like the “canonical” events of 1982-83 and 1997-98, Lynette Bettio, a senior climatologist with the bureau said. Model projections also have the event lasting well into next autumn.
The Southern Oscillation Index, which measures the pressure difference between Darwin and Tahiti, had also dropped sharply in recent weeks, one gauge watched closely by farmers worried about the rainfall outlook, she said.
El Ninos are characterised by central and eastern parts of the Pacific warming relative to those in the west. One result is that the normally easterly trade winds slow or reverse, with rainfall patterns tending to shift eastwards away from eastern Australia and south-east Asia.
Cool patch coming
While global temperatures tend to be boosted by El Ninos, the pattern does not mean all regions are warmer than usual for the event’s duration.
Australia, for instance, is about to enter a relatively cool patch mostly as a series of powerful cold fronts from the south penetrate unusually far to the north.
The first of them should move across south-eastern Australia on Friday and Saturday, and “is going to be the coldest front of the year”, Tristan Meyers, a meteorologist at Weatherzone, said. (See below for Sunday’s synoptic chart.)
Temperatures will be noticeably cooler in Melbourne, with the maximum dropping from 15 degrees on Thursday to 11-13 from Saturday to Tuesday. In Sydney, relatively mild maximums of 19 degrees on Friday and Saturday will retreat to 15 degrees by Sunday.
“We’re going to see some frost up in south-east Queensland,” Mr Meyers said.
Towns such as Stanthorpe will likely have a top of just 8 degrees on Sunday and Monday, with overnight lows of minus-2 to zero, according to the bureau.
While the front as a while won’t be bringing a lot of rain, the ski resorts should receive another 10 centimetres or so of snow to boost their thin natural cover, Mr Meyer said, adding that more fronts won’t be far behind.
Permalink | Categories Breaking News on July 9, 2015 by FishingNews | Comments Off on El Nino Impacts Could be Among Strongest Ever, Stretch Into 2016 After Series of Cyclones Tags: El Nino
For the past two weeks, winds have been blowing in an anomalous west-to-east pattern across the Western Pacific. It’s the third such pattern since El Nino conditions began to become more prevalent during March of this year. And forecast model response to the most recent westerly wind burst is an overall shift toward predicting a record event. Models are starting to settle on at least a strong El Nino come fall (1.5 degree Celsius anomaly or greater for Nino 3.4) with many ensembles predicting something even more intense than the super El Nino of 1998.
This third, El Nino heightening, westerly wind burst (WWB) coincided with a strong, wet variation of the Madden Julian Oscillation pumping up thunderstorm activity throughout the region. Last week, a consistent 20-35 mph westerly wind pattern had become very well established. Over the past four days, multiple cyclones became embedded within the pattern, which now stretches over 3,000 miles in length, pushing locally stronger winds and reinforcing the already significant wind field.
By today four cyclonic systems, including Typhoon Chan-Hom, had further heightened westerly wind intensity:
(The current strong westerly wind burst is looking more and more like the extreme event of early March of this year. It’s the third such event — one that is increasing the likelihood that the 2015 El Nino will be one more for the record books. Image source: Earth Nullschool.)
It’s a pattern that in today’s map looks very similar to the record event which occurred this Spring. And it’s the third significant WWB to initiate since March of this year.
WWBs push warm surface water in the Western Pacific downward and across the ocean (read more about how WWBs affect El Nino severity here). These warm water pulses traverse thousands of miles, finally resurfacing in the Eastern Pacific off South America. The resultant warming of surface waters there and through the mid ocean region tends to set in place ocean temperature and atmospheric patterns that reinforce El Nino — driving more westerly winds and still more warm water displacement eastward.
(CFSv2 Model runs are pointing toward a very powerful anomaly come Fall. Image source: Climate Prediction Center.)
This third strong westerly wind burst appears to have again pushed model forecasts into very extreme ranges for Fall of this year. NOAA’s CFSv2 ensembles now predicts a peak sea surface temperature anomaly in the range of 2.5 degrees Celsius above average to 3.1 degrees Celsius above average. An El Nino of this strength would be significantly stronger than the monster event of 1998. One that would occur in a global context that includes an approximate 45 parts per million CO2e worth of heat trapping gas accumulation since that time. One that is now in the range of 1 C warming above 1880s averages (or 1/4th the difference between now and the last ice age, but on the side of hot).
Since we are now well past the spring predictability barrier, these new model runs have a higher potential accuracy. That said, we are still four months out and a number of additional factors would have to come into play to lock in such a powerful event. However, the trend is still for a strong to extraordinarily powerful El Nino. And since such an event is occurring in a record warm atmosphere and ocean environment (due to human-caused climate change), the continued potential for related additional anomalous weather events (drought, flood, wildfires, extreme tropical cyclones in the Pacific, etc) is also high enough to remain a serious concern.
To the surprise of pretty much everybody paying attention to the 138-square-mile closure of all fishing grounds in and around the May 19 Refugio Oil Spill site, the California Department of Fish and Wildlife reopened the closed region on Monday afternoon.
As of late last week, there was no indication that fishermen would be permitted access to the area any time soon. “Turnaround was incredibly quick and everybody was stoked that all those fish came in clean,” said commercial fisherman Michael Harrington, referring to the range of invertebrates and finfish that were collected and tested for contamination.
Fish and Wildlife spokesperson Alexia Retallack said that the Office of Environmental Health Hazard Assessment “worked with the testing labs to expedite the process.” The emergency closure covered an area from Coal Oil Point to Hollister ranch, six miles out to sea.
Commercial and recreational fishing is still restricted within the Naples and Campus Point marine conservation areas, both of which were established in 2012. Also, the annual mussel quarantine — to protect the public against paralytic shellfish poisoning — is currently in effect and typically runs until the end of October.
Permalink | Categories Breaking News on June 30, 2015 by FishingNews | Comments Off on Fishing Grounds Reopen After Refugio Oil Spill Tags: Refugio oil spill