Earth’s oceans are hotter than ever — and getting warmer faster

The world’s oceans hit their warmest level in recorded history in 2019, according to a study published Monday that provides more evidence that Earth is warming at an accelerated pace.

The analysis, which also found that ocean temperatures in the last decade have been the warmest on record, shows the impact of human-caused warming on the planet’s oceans and suggests that sea-level rise, ocean acidification and extreme weather events could worsen as the oceans continue to absorb so much heat.

“The pace of warming has increased about 500 percent since the late 1980s,” said one of the study’s authors, John Abraham, a professor of thermal sciences at the University of St. Thomas in St. Paul, Minnesota. “The findings, to be honest, were not unexpected. Warming is continuing, it has accelerated, and it is unabated. Unless we do something significant and quickly, it’s really dire news.”

Abraham and his colleagues found that the rate of ocean warming accelerated from 1987 to 2019 to nearly 4½ times the rate of warming from 1955 to 1986.

According to the study, published Monday in the journal Advances in Atmospheric Sciences, average ocean temperatures in 2019 were 0.075 degrees Celsius (0.135 degrees Fahrenheit) above the 1981-2019 average. While that may seem minuscule, it represents an enormous amount of heat spread out across the world’s oceans, according to the study’s lead author, Lijing Cheng, an associate professor at the Institute of Atmospheric Physics in Beijing.

“The amount of heat we have put in the world’s oceans in the past 25 years equals to 3.6 billion Hiroshima atom bomb explosions,” Cheng said in a statement.

The study, conducted by an international team of 14 scientists, found that oceans have absorbed more than 90 percent of the heat trapped on Earth from greenhouse gas emissions since 1970.

“Oceans are the biggest reservoir of heat and therefore the best indicator of climate change,” Abraham said. “If you want to know how fast the Earth is warming, look at the oceans.”

Scientists are worried by the trend because warmer oceans can increase severe weather and intensify storms.

“It’s like putting weather on steroids,” Johnson said. “We did a study a few years ago that showed Hurricane Harvey in Texas passed over a very warm body of water, and that greatly increased the amount of rainfall.”

Harvey unleashed more than 60 inches of rain over southeastern Texas in 2017, and scientists have said climate change will make storms rainier overall.

Warmer oceans also expand and melt ice, speeding the rise in sea levels and increasing the risk to coastal communities and low-lying infrastructure, said Nick Bond, a professor of atmospheric sciences at the University of Washington in Seattle, who wasn’t involved with the new study. According to the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, average global sea levels could rise by 0.95 feet to 3.61 feet by the end of the century.

“From Miami Beach to Bangladesh — as sea levels continue to creep up, it’s just going to become less viable to live in these places,” Bond said.

He added that there are other significant societal implications, such as the effect that warming oceans may have on the chemistry and biology of the world’s oceans.

When carbon dioxide is absorbed and mixes with ocean water, chemical reactions make the water more acidic. Some sea creatures and ecosystems, such as corals, struggle with this type of acidification, but Bond said scientists don’t yet know the extent of the potential fallout.

“There are going to be winners and losers, but we don’t know how that will all play out,” he said. “It’s a very complicated system, and we don’t fully understand which species will have to shift their range, which ones may go extinct or which ones may prosper.”

Katie Matthews, chief scientist at Oceana, an ocean conservation organization in Washington, D.C., said ocean warming could have enormous impacts on fisheries around the world, particularly in the tropics.

“The tropics are the areas that have the largest number of people reliant on fish for nutrition, food security and livelihood,” she said. “It’s really unfortunate that the most vulnerable and at-risk populations are going to be the ones most affected.”

The study, which incorporated measurements from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, used data on ocean temperatures dating to the 1950s. The measurements included recordings of temperatures extending from the sea surface to depths of more than 6,500 feet.

Average ocean temperatures over the years have followed the warming trend, but Abraham said some of the most pronounced warming has taken place in the South Atlantic Ocean, in the Pacific Ocean off the coast of Japan, and in the waters south of Australia.

Abraham said he hopes the findings will spark climate action around the world.

“This isn’t a political issue,” he said. “This is a science issue, and our measurements are telling us that this is a problem and we need to take action.”

FEELING SQUIDDISH | Local market squid fisheries impacted by warm blob in Pacific

California Market Squid regenerative their population every year.

By Kimberly Rivers

The squid landing docks at the Port of Hueneme are quiet. In recent years the summer months were busy with dozens of boats coming and going, offloading millions of pounds of California Market Squid into tanks for export to Asia for processing and then returning to be served up for fried calamari or other dishes.

The local squid fishery declined from 2014-16 in response to a warm water mass called “the blob.” The name was coined by Nicholas Bond, Alaska-based research scientist with the Joint Institute for the Study of the Atmosphere and Ocean (JISAO) at the University of Washington. Blob, as expected, is a reference to the amorphous monster from the 1958 horror classic film.

Typically ocean temperatures 50 miles off the Southern California coast are “very much in step” with the ocean temperatures at the equator, said Clarissa Anderson, executive director of the Southern California Coastal Ocean Observing System (SCCOOS). The system she manages is part of a network of systems monitoring ocean conditions worldwide. “Then they diverge when the blob hit in 2014 and only come back together again for the big 2016 El Niño, then diverge again. This may be related to the perturbation caused by the blob temp anomaly that lasted so long.”

The blob was a “large anomalously warm” area of the Pacific Ocean, “spread over a broad area, resulting in major ecosystem impacts,” said Anderson.

Anderson and Bond monitor different sensor systems in their regions and look for anomalies in the oceans. She said the blob mostly impacted the area for about two years and “prevented mixing of water, caused the drought, wildfires,” and decimated the Dungeness crab industry along the Pacific Coast.

When asked whether we are seeing a blob 2.0, causing a decline in the squid fishery in the area, she said people may be “quick to call it that in homage to the past blob,” but she is not certain it’s a new blob, but might be that the blob never really left.

“We don’t have a threshold for when to call it a blob,” said Anderson. “I don’t know if we are having an actual true marine heat wave.”

Warm water prevents the normal upwelling of cool water from deeper water that contains important nutrients and food sources for species that live at shallower depths. “We have seen a lot of upwelling in the spring,” she said, noting that much of the ocean is looking like “business as usual” but with a “warmer background level of water.”

That warmer background water could reveal a trend, part of what is needed to identify a true anomaly, which would indicate something serious occurring. To confirm that, Anderson said data must be “compared to a background baseline,” and an increase in temperature is only significant when it “deviates from a background norm.” Reviewing temperatures each day is not enough; current day temps must be run against past data over time to identify a true change or trend showing temperature increase.  

After reviewing the most recent days’ data, Anderson said that there appears to be “anomalously warm water off the Central Coast.” She emphasized the data set covered “the climatology period 2007 to the present.” It does show a red blob-shaped area about 250 kilometers off the Central Coast that is four degrees higher than the normal range of temperatures.

In 2010, well before the blob arrived, squid season in the Ventura area brought in 126 million pounds of squid valued at $33.7 million. By 2016, total poundage dropped by a third to 34 million pounds valued at $16.8 million.

2018 data shows a continued declining trend totaling 27.6 million pounds valued at $13.6 million. Ventura Harbor and Port Hueneme landings for squid in 2018 were valued at $6.7 million and $6.8 million respectively, less than half of the 2010 value. Data and values are according to records held by the California Department of Fish and Wildlife.

“The good news is that squid are pretty resilient,” said Diane Pleschner-Steele, executive director of California Wetfish Producers Association. The species does prefer cooler water, but is showing an ability to move and find food. “And squid are very cyclical . . . We can’t afford to lose our squid fisheries . . . and a number of species are going to be hit hard by ocean acidification and climate change.”

In terms of how warm water will impact market squid, “It depends where the food goes,” Pleschner-Steele said. “Squid are pretty voracious predators. When we have typical cooler upwelled water that is more nutrient rich, we have more squid.”

Squid will devour krill in the deeper offshore areas. As they move closer to shore to spawn, they become “cannibalistic” and eat each other. This may contribute to the resiliency as the ocean ecosystem changes.

Pleshchner-Steele also pointed to the normal cyclical nature of squid populations, saying “Ventura got used to having squid in the summer time.” The strong El Niña in the Pacific created an abnormal situation between 2010 and 2013, and a “decadal squid boom for southern California” led to the seemingly major shifts.  “My guess is to see a return to normal pattern.”

She referred to a research project of the California Department of Fish and Wildlife, completed in February, that “saw a bump in the para-larvae numbers” of market squid. She said that is a signal that there is likely to be an uptick in squid number in about nine to 10 months. “Ventura will just have to wait until fall.”

Original post: https://www.vcreporter.com/

Major Disease Outbreak Strikes California Sea Lions

Shawn Johnson knew it was coming.

“Last fall, we saw a few cases,” he said. “And that was a warning signal, so we were prepared—well, we weren’t prepared for this level of an outbreak.”

Over the past month, Johnson, director of veterinary science at the Marine Mammal Center, just north of San Francisco, and his team have been getting an average of five sick California sea lions a day. The animals have leptospirosis, a bacterial infection that affects their kidneys, causing fatigue, abdominal pain and, more often than not, death.

As of October 16, Johnson’s team had seen 220 sea lions with the disease, which made it the center’s second largest outbreak. Since then, the center reported 29 more sea lions have been rescued and 10 of those died due to leptospirosis. More than a dozen animals are still awaiting diagnosis. The number of cases has started to slow, but if historical trends hold up, Johnson expects this outbreak to eventually surpass 2004’s record of 304 cases of sea lion leptospirosis.

The Marine Mammal Center in Sausalito, CA, is responding to an outbreak of a potentially fatal bacterial infection called leptospirosis in California sea lions. The pictured sea lion, Glazer, is seen curled up with his flippers folded tightly over his abdomen prior to his rescue by trained Center responders in Monterey. The posture exhibited is known as “lepto pose,” and is often an indication the sea lion is suffering the effects of the disease. (The Marine Mammal Center)

All told, about 70 percent of the sea lions the team tried to save have died.

Leptospirosis outbreaks among sea lions occur at fairly regular intervals, but changing ocean conditions—warmer waters and relocating fish—are affecting how the disease strikes populations along the Pacific Coast. The threats aren’t new, but they’re threatening in slightly new ways. Changes in marine conditions appear to be affecting the population’s resiliency to this disease and others. While researchers scramble to save sick sea lions today, they are also studying what this year’s outbreak can tell us about how sea lions will fare down the line.

The good news is that sea lions are fairly mobile and resilient animals. And until recently, their populations were booming. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration announced in January that California sea lions had reached carrying capacity—the number of individuals their environment can sustainably support—in 2008.

Since then, though, their numbers have fluctuated. A “blob” of unusually warm and long-lasting water moved in along the West Coast from 2013 to 2015, causing widespread algal blooms that spread a neurotoxin called domoic acid throughout the marine food chain. Sea lions with elevated levels of the toxin suffered brain damage, resulting in strokes and an impaired ability to navigate, ultimately killing most of the afflicted individuals.

The warm water also sent fish and smaller marine life out to search for cooler environments, meaning the sea lions had to travel farther to find food. The combination of more distant hunting and impaired navigation led to record numbers of stranded pups—many taken in by the Marine Mammal Center—as well as a dip in the sea lion population during those years.

California sea lion Yakshack is one of 220 patients at The Marine Mammal Center in Sausalito, CA, that has been rescued so far this year impacted by a bacterial disease known as leptospirosis. The Center has been at the forefront of research on leptospirosis in marine mammals and has published a number of scientific papers on the disease dating back to 1985. (Bill Hunnewell / The Marine Mammal Center)

But the warm water conditions also led, ironically, to a decline in cases of leptospirosis during that time. Over the past decade, scientists have determined that the disease, which spreads via a parasite, is endemic to the population. Some animals carry the disease and don’t get sick, but they do excrete the parasites in their urine, which is how it spreads to other individuals. When sea lions haul out on a pier or beach, they freely roll around in each other’s pee.

When the blob of warm water appeared, sea lions had to swim farther to find food and had less time to haul out and be social, Johnson says, meaning less time sitting around in each other’s pee and parasites—and fewer cases of leptospirosis. But the lack of the disease a few years ago led to consequences today. Sea lions that get leptospirosis and survive develop antibodies that fend off the parasite in the future, says Katie Prager, a veterinarian researcher at UCLA’s Lloyd-Smith Laboratory who collaborates with the Marine Mammal Center. These antibodies, however, cannot be inherited by offspring.

“It’s not something that can be passed on,” Prager says. “Antibodies are something that the pup has to develop on its own.”

The warm waters meant fewer sick sea lions, but it left the population very vulnerable. Now the disease is back with a vengeance.

“A lot of the animals are now naive to that bacteria and their immune systems haven’t been exposed to that,” says Alissa Deming, a veterinarian researcher at Dauphin Island Sea Lab in Alabama who previously studied sea lion diseases at the Marine Mammal Research Center. “There is a group of animals that haven’t seen this before.”

The risk, according to the researchers, is that continued domoic acid outbreaks could result in a vicious cycle—fewer cases of leptospirosis produce unexposed populations, and then major outbreaks flare up like we are seeing this year.

“This is a great example of how environmental change has so much impact on a wild species—all the way from where they eat, where they migrate and how their diseases change over time, just based on a few degrees’ increase,” Johnson says.

California sea lion Herbie lays on his pen floor during treatment for leptospirosis at The Marine Mammal Center in Sausalito, CA. Veterinarians can usually identify leptospirosis in a patient even before laboratory tests confirm a diagnosis because of the infection’s distinctive symptoms in California sea lions, which include drinking water and folding the flippers over the abdomen. (Bill Hunnewell / The Marine Mammal Center)

The first documented case of a marine mammal suffering from the domoic acid toxin was in 1998, and the events are now increasing in frequency—so much so that the spread of domoic acid has become a yearly sign of the changing seasons around San Francisco Bay. “The days are getting shorter, pumpkin spice lattes are here and once again, it’s time for that other Bay Area rite of fall: worrying about the levels of toxins in local Dungeness crabs,” begins a recent San Francisco Chronicle article on the influence of the toxin on the start of crabbing season.

Sea lions don’t wait for permission from the Department of Public Health before they start eating crabs, though.

To exacerbate the issue even more, an El Nino event is predicted over the coming months, meaning warmer ocean waters off the West Coast and possibly more algal blooms and toxins. Already, Southern California waters—where researchers have found some of the highest concentrations of diatoms that produce domoic acid—have had record high temperatures this year.

NOAA has even deemed the recent warm-water years a “climate change stress test” for West Coast oceans. The agency said the conditions “may offer previews of anthropogenic climate change impacts projected for the latter part of the 21st century.”

If this has been a test, sea lions might not have passed, says Robert DeLong, a scientist with NOAA’s Alaska Fisheries Science Center. DeLong has been studying California sea lions for decades at their breeding grounds, Channel Islands off Santa Barbara. He says the species should be pretty resilient in the face of climate change, but the rate of warming waters is proving a major challenge.

Volunteers from The Marine Mammal Center in Sausalito, CA, release California sea lions Bogo (left), Brielle (center), and Biggie (right) back to the wild near Bodega Bay. All three sea lions were treated for leptospirosis at the Center’s Sausalito hospital. Many different animal species, including humans and dogs, can become infected with Leptospira through contact with contaminated urine, water or soil. The Center has a number of safety protocols in place to prevent transmission to veterinarians and volunteers working with sea lion patients. (Bill Hunnewell / The Marine Mammal Center)

The center of the West Coast sea lion population is around Baja California, so the species has adapted to warmer water than is currently being seen farther north up the coast. “They have that capability to live in warmer water,” DeLong says. And unlike, say, coral reefs, sea lions are very mobile, able to swim long distances to find suitable habitats.

But while males can chase food far up north, during the breeding season females are tied to a small radius around the rookery. If there is less food available there because fish have moved to cooler waters, it could present a major problem for sea lion mothers and their pups.

“So if this is what climate change looks like, and this period is an adequate proxy, if that’s really the case, then sea lions may not do as well as we would think,” DeLong says.

There are still signs of hope. Sea lions are increasingly moving north to new breeding grounds off the San Francisco Bay, for instance. The limiting factor is time.

“If the environmental changes are slow enough to adapt, they’ll be able to move and will probably move farther up the coast,” Johnson said. “If changes are slow enough, I could see them being able to adapt.”

Original post: https://www.smithsonianmag.com/

Startling new research finds large buildup of heat in the oceans, suggesting a faster rate of global warming

The findings mean the world might have less time to curb carbon emissions.

A post-sunset swimmer at Moonlight Beach in Encinitas, Calif., this month. (Mike Blake/Reuters) (MIKE BLAKE/Reuters)

The world’s oceans have been soaking up far more excess heat in recent decades than scientists realized, suggesting that Earth could be set to warm even faster than predicted in the years ahead, according to new research published Wednesday.

Over the past quarter-century, Earth’s oceans have retained 60 percent more heat each year than scientists previously had thought, said Laure Resplandy, a geoscientist at Princeton University who led the startling study published Wednesday in the journal Nature. The difference represents an enormous amount of additional energy, originating from the sun and trapped by Earth’s atmosphere — the yearly amount representing more than eight times the world’s annual energy consumption.

In the scientific realm, the new findings help resolve long-running doubts about the rate of the warming of the oceans before 2007, when reliable measurements from devices called “Argo floats” were put to use worldwide. Before that, differing types of temperature records — and an overall lack of them — contributed to murkiness about how quickly the oceans were heating up.

The higher-than-expected amount of heat in the oceans means more heat is being retained within Earth’s climate system each year, rather than escaping into space. In essence, more heat in the oceans signals that global warming is more advanced than scientists thought.

“We thought that we got away with not a lot of warming in both the ocean and the atmosphere for the amount of CO2 that we emitted,” said Resplandy, who published the work with experts from the Scripps Institution of Oceanography and several other institutions in the United States, China, France and Germany. “But we were wrong. The planet warmed more than we thought. It was hidden from us just because we didn’t sample it right. But it was there. It was in the ocean already.”

Wednesday’s study also could have important policy implications. If ocean temperatures are rising more rapidly than previously calculated, that could leave nations even less time to dramatically cut the world’s emissions of carbon dioxide, in the hope of limiting global warming to the ambitious goal of 1.5 degrees Celsius (2.7 degrees Fahrenheit) above preindustrial levels by the end of this century.

The world already has warmed one degree Celsius (1.8 degrees Fahrenheit) since the late 19th century. Scientists backed by the United Nations reported this month that with warming projected to steadily increase, the world faces a daunting challenge in trying to limit that warming to only another half-degree Celsius. The group found that it would take “unprecedented” action by leaders across the globe over the coming decade to even have a shot at that goal.

Meanwhile, the Trump administration has continued to roll back regulations aimed at reducing carbon emissions from vehicles, coal plants and other sources and has said it intends to withdraw from the Paris climate accord. In one instance, the administration relied on an assumption that the planet will warm a disastrous seven degrees Fahrenheit, or about four degrees Celsius, by the end of the century in arguing that a proposal to ease vehicle fuel-efficiency standards would have only minor climate impacts.

The new research underscores the potential consequences of global inaction. Rapidly warming oceans mean that seas will rise faster and that more heat will be delivered to critical locations that already are facing the effects of a warming climate, such as coral reefs in the tropics and the ice sheets of Greenland and Antarctica.

“In case the larger estimate of ocean heat uptake turns out to be true, adaptation to — and mitigation of — our changing climate would become more urgent,” said Pieter Tans, who is the leader of the Carbon Cycle Greenhouse Gases Group at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and was not involved in the study.

The oceans absorb more than 90 percent of the excess energy trapped within the world’s atmosphere.

The new research does not measure the ocean’s temperature directly. Rather, it measures the volume of gases, specifically oxygen and carbon dioxide, that have escaped the ocean in recent decades and headed into the atmosphere as it heats up. The method offered scientists a reliable indicator of ocean temperature change because it reflects a fundamental behavior of a liquid when heated.

“When the ocean warms, it loses some gas to the atmosphere,” Resplandy said. “That’s an analogy that I make all the time: If you leave your Coke in the sun, it will lose the gas.”

This approach allowed researchers to recheck the contested history of ocean temperatures in a different and novel way. In doing so, they came up with a higher number for how much warming the oceans have experienced over time.

“I feel like this is a triumph of Earth-system science. That we could get confirmation from atmospheric gases of ocean heat content is extraordinary,” said Joellen Russell, a professor and oceanographer at the University of Arizona. “You’ve got the A team here on this paper.”

But Russell said the findings are hardly as uplifting.

The report “does have implications for climate sensitivity, meaning, how warm does a certain amount of CO2 make us?” Russell said, adding that the world could have a smaller “carbon budget” than once thought. That budget refers to the amount of carbon dioxide humans can emit while still being able to keep warming below dangerous levels.

The scientists calculated that because of the increased heat already stored in the ocean, the maximum emissions that the world can produce while still avoiding a warming of two degrees Celsius (3.6 Fahrenheit) would have to be reduced by 25 percent. That represents a very significant shrinkage of an already very narrow carbon “budget.”

The U.N. panel of climate scientists said recently that global carbon emissions must be cut in half by 2030 if the world hopes to remain beneath 1.5 Celsius of warming. But Resplandy said that the evidence of faster-warming oceans “shifts the probability, making it harder to stay below the 1.5-degree temperature target.”

Understanding what is happening with Earth’s oceans is critical, because they, far more than the atmosphere, are the mirror of ongoing climate change.

According to a major climate report released last year by the U.S. government, the world’s oceans have absorbed about 93 percent of the excess heat caused by greenhouse gases since the mid-20th century. Scientists have found that ocean heat has increased at all depths since the 1960s, while surface waters also have warmed. The federal climate report projected a global increase in average sea surface temperatures of as much as nearly five degrees Fahrenheit by 2100 if emissions continue unabated, with even higher levels of warming in some U.S. coastal regions.

The world’s oceans also absorb more than a quarter of the carbon dioxide emitted annually from human activities — an effect making them more acidic and threatening fragile ecosystems, federal researchers say. “The rate of acidification is unparalleled in at least the past 66 million years,” the government climate report stated.

Paul Durack, a research scientist at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California, said Wednesday’s study offers “a really interesting new insight” and is “quite alarming.”

The warming found in the study is “more than twice the rates of long-term warming estimates from the 1960s and ’70s to the present,” Durack said, adding that if these rates are validated by further studies, “it means the rate of warming and the sensitivity of the Earth’s system to greenhouse gases is at the upper end.” He said that if scientists have underestimated the amount of heat taken up by the oceans, “it will mean we need to go back to the drawing board” on the aggressiveness of mitigation actions the world needs to take promptly to limit future warming.

Beyond the long-term implications of warmer oceans, Russell added that in the short term, even small changes in ocean temperatures can affect weather in specific places. For instance, scientists have said warmer oceans off the coast of New England have contributed to more-intense winter storms.

“We’re only just now discovering how important ocean warming is to our daily lives, to our daily weather,” she said.

Original post: https://www.washingtonpost.com/

Fish will migrate as temperatures warm, putting fisheries at risk

A new paper projects how warming ocean temperatures will affect the geographic distribution of 686 commercially important species around North America. Species migration and shifting home ranges have serious implications for natural resource management, particularly fisheries.

Read about it here:
http://sustainablefisheries-uw.org/fish-will-migrate-as-temperatures-warm/

Research Article:

Projecting shifts in thermal habitat for 686 species on the North American continental shelf

As Oceans Warm, the World’s Kelp Forests Begin to Disappear

November Takes a Bite Out of ‘the Blob’

Warm expanse that heated up West Coast waters is beaten, but not yet broken

The so-called “blob” of infamous warm ocean waters that has gripped the West Coast and shaken up its marine ecosystems in the past two years is battered, but not dead yet, NOAA scientists report.

Strong winds blowing south from Alaska toward California dominated the West Coast through much of November, bringing cold air and some new upwelling of deep, cold water that weakened the warm patches that had long made up the blob, said Nathan Mantua, leader of the Landscape Ecology Team at NOAA Fisheries’ Southwest Fisheries Science Center in Santa Cruz, California. Patches of ocean that had been as much as 2 to 3 degrees C warmer than average in October have now dropped sharply to around 0.5 to 1.5 degrees C above average. Some areas along the Northern California Coast have even dropped to slightly below average temperatures for this time of year, he said.

The blob has become one of the best-known temporary features of the world’s oceans, a big red expanse on temperature maps that has earned headlines in the New York Times and other outlets around the world. It has also become one of the hottest topics in climatology and oceanography, with scientists looking for possible links to climate change and the California drought; shifting distributions of marine species; and the unprecedented harmful algal bloom that has encompassed the West Coast, shutting down crabbing and clamming for months.

The one main exception to the blob’s decline is a narrow band of still-warm water along the coast from Southern California to San Francisco that remains about 3 degrees C above normal for this time of year. But the band may also be an early signal of the arrival of El Niño-related ocean currents, which are expected to cause more warming along the Pacific Coast in the next few months, Mantua said.

Research scientist Nick Bond of the NOAA Joint Institute for the Study of the Atmosphere and Ocean at the University of Washington originally coined the term, “the blob,” to describe the warm expanse. He said climate models agree the strip of warm water will remain along the West Coast, perhaps helping the blob hang on. He figures that the conditions might continue “well into 2016, and be of great enough magnitude to matter to marine ecosystems. How much is the big question.”

“Unusually warm temperatures still dominate the Pacific between Hawaii and the West Coast, but the amount of warmth is lower now than it has been for most of the past two years,” Mantua said. “As we get into the winter months, the expected El Niño influence on North Pacific weather and ocean currents includes more dramatic changes in West Coast ocean temperatures that will likely include coastal warming and offshore cooling.”

Previous articles

A Remarkable Warming of Central California’s Coastal Ocean (Jul 30, 2014)

Unusual North Pacific Warmth Jostles Marine Food Chain (Sep 8, 2014)

Oncoming El Niño Likely to Continue Species Shakeup in Pacific (Oct 1, 2015)

Contact: SWFSC Fisheries Ecology Division, Landscape Ecology Team

Current conditions: What’s happening now?

Below are the most recent sea surface temperature anomaly maps for the U.S. West Coast and the Northeast Pacific. These images are generated live from a data server, so they make take a few seconds to display.

Read the original story: https://swfsc.noaa.gov/

Ocean investigators set their sights on Pacific Ocean ‘blob’

By Kerry Klein kklein@mercurynews.com

A huge swath of unusually warm water that has drawn tropical fish and turtles to the normally cool West Coast over the past year has grown to the biggest and longest-lasting ocean temperature anomaly on record, researchers now say, profoundly affecting climate and marine life from Baja California to Alaska.

Researchers remain uncertain what caused the mass of warm seawater they simply call “the blob,” or what it’ll mean long term for the West Coast climate. But they agree it’s imperative to better understand its impact, as it may be linked to everything from California’s drought to record numbers of marine mammals washing up on Northern California shores.

The blob — that’s the technical term — first appeared in late 2013 as a smudge of warm water near Alaska. It then expanded southeast and merged with warm waters farther south, growing into an anomaly that extended from the Aleutian Islands to Baja California and stretched hundreds of miles west toward Hawaii.

“Just the enormous magnitude of this anomaly is what’s incredible,” said Art Miller, an oceanographer at the Scripps Institute of Oceanography in La Jolla. He was among nearly 100 scientists from Canada, the U.S. and Mexico who gathered recently at Scripps for the first time to share research about the warm-water mass.

The warmest ocean temperatures in the blob now are around 5 degrees Fahrenheit above average.A huge swath of unusually warm water that has drawn tropical fish and turtles to the normally cool West Coast over the past year has grown to the biggest and longest-lasting ocean temperature anomaly on record, researchers now say, profoundly affecting climate and marine life from Baja California to Alaska.

Researchers remain uncertain what caused the mass of warm seawater they simply call “the blob,” or what it’ll mean long term for the West Coast climate. But they agree it’s imperative to better understand its impact, as it may be linked to everything from California’s drought to record numbers of marine mammals washing up on Northern California shores.

The blob — that’s the technical term — first appeared in late 2013 as a smudge of warm water near Alaska. It then expanded southeast and merged with warm waters farther south, growing into an anomaly that extended from the Aleutian Islands to Baja California and stretched hundreds of miles west toward Hawaii.

“Just the enormous magnitude of this anomaly is what’s incredible,” said Art Miller, an oceanographer at the Scripps Institute of Oceanography in La Jolla. He was among nearly 100 scientists from Canada, the U.S. and Mexico who gathered recently at Scripps for the first time to share research about the warm-water mass.

The warmest ocean temperatures in the blob now are around 5 degrees Fahrenheit above average.

“They’re just so far off the mean that they’re shocking,” Miller said.

The blob continues to evolve. In the last month, seasonal upwelling of cooler water in Northern California has split it into two separate masses once again. And 2015 is shaping up to be an El Niño year, marked by unseasonably warm waters off the coast of South America. What researchers don’t know is if El Niño will exacerbate or neutralize the blob.

Researchers agree that unusually slack winds are to blame for the warming ocean off the West Coast, though they don’t know what drove the drop in wind. Stronger winds typically cause deep, cooler water to rise to the surface.

“If you don’t blow the wind as much, you don’t stir the ocean as much,” Miller said. The same mechanism, he said, also may be preventing rainfall from reaching California.

In August, a temperature sensor in Monterey Bay picked up its highest temperature reading ever recorded, said Francisco Chavez, a physical oceanographer at the Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute. On land, 2014 was the hottest year on record in California and temperatures remained higher than average until spring of this year.

Less ocean stirring also reduces upwelling of nutrient-rich deep water to the surface, which researchers think is directly related to die-offs in some marine mammals and declines in sardine fisheries. The dearth of nutrients cascades up the food chain through the ecosystem, resulting in less phytoplankton and hungrier sea lions and seals.

A California sea lion pup recovers at The Marine Mammal Center. Researchers say the phenomenon of the so-called ‘ocean blob’ of unusually warm Pacific Ocean water is causing a decrease in the food available to the pups’ mothers, and increasingly, they are abandoning their offspring because they can’t feed them. Credit Pat Wilson © The Marine Mammal Center

Sea lion pup Percevero (center) is one of more than 200 patients at The Marine Mammal Center in Sausalito, California. Researchers say the phenomenon of the so-called ‘ocean blob’ of unusually warm Pacific Ocean water is causing a decrease in the food available to the pups’ mothers, and increasingly, they are abandoning their offspring because they can’t feed them. Credit © The Marine Mammal Center

Volunteers from The Marine Mammal Center release California sea lions at Chimney Rock in Point Reyes National Seashore in 2014. Researchers say the phenomenon of the so-called ‘ocean blob’ of unusually warm Pacific Ocean water is causing a decrease in the food available to the pups’ mothers, and increasingly, they are abandoning their offspring because they can’t feed them.Credit Conner Jay © The Marine Mammal Center

In 2014, the Marine Mammal Center in Sausalito saw more stranded California sea lions and northern elephant seals than average, according to center marine scientist Tenaya Norris, and record numbers of dying Guadalupe fur seals have washed up so far in 2015. Norris said that only about 60 percent of the mammals they rescue recover enough to be returned to the wild.

This year, sea lion pups in particular are stranding much earlier than usual, a sign that their mothers are abandoning them — an alarming indication that there’s just not enough food in the water.

“It’s a failure on the mothers’ part to adequately provision the pups,” Norris said. “They’ve been successfully foraging for years, so they should be able to find food if it’s out there.”

Paradoxically, Chavez said, 2014 in Monterey Bay was a “bonanza” for many species of birds, dolphins and whales. He hypothesized that nutrient upwelling didn’t disappear; it just shifted into cooler water closer to the coast, condensing an ecosystem that typically stretches tens of miles to only a few miles offshore. It’s unclear, however, whether the warm-water blob has played a role in the unusual number of dead whales — a dozen so far this year — that have washed ashore along Northern California beaches.

With still so many unknowns, the researchers in La Jolla agreed to meet again this coming fall. Until then, they all have homework: run climate models and dig deeper into data for patterns in weather, ocean chemistry and marine life.

“I don’t think that we found the smoking gun at the meeting,” Chavez said.

Read the original story: mercurynews.com

Sardines move north due to ocean warming

Original post: Phys.org

Sardines, anchovies and mackerels play a crucial role in marine ecosystems, as well as having a high commercial value. However, the warming of waters makes them vanish from their usual seas and migrate north, as confirmed by a pioneering study analysing 57,000 fish censuses from 40 years. The researchers warn that coastal towns dependent on these fishery resources must adapt their economies.

The continued increase in water temperature has altered the structure and functioning of marine ecosystems across the world. The effect has been greater in the North Atlantic, with increases of up to 1.3 ºC in the average temperature over the last 30 years.

This variation directly affects the frequency and biogeography of a group of pelagic fish, which includes the sardine (Sardina pilchardus), anchovy (Engraulis encrasicolus), horse mackerel (Trachurus trachurus) and mackerel (Scomber scombrus), among others, which feed off phytoplankton and zooplankton and that are the staple diet of large predators such as cetaceans, large fish and marine birds. These fish also represent a significant source of income for the majority of coastal countries in the world.

Until now, scientists had not managed to prove whether the changes observed in the physiology of the pelagic fish were the direct result of the water temperature or if they were due to changes in plankton communities, their main food source, which have also been affected by global warming and have changed their distribution and abundance.

The new study, published in Global Change Biology and that has developed statistical models for the North Sea area, confirms the great importance of sea temperatures. “Time series of zooplankton and sea surface temperature data have been included to determine the factor causing these patterns”, Ignasi Montero-Serra, lead author of the study and researcher in the department of Ecology at the University of Barcelona, explains to SINC.

Bioindicators of the health of the sea

To demonstrate the consequences of the warming of the seas, the research team analysed 57,000 fish censuses from commercial fishing performed independently along the European continental shelf between 1965 and 2012, extracted from data provided by the International Council for the Exploration of the Sea (ICES).

The study, the first to be carried out on such a large time scale and area, allows for the dynamics of this species to be understood in relation to the rapid warming of the oceans that has been happening since the eighties.

The results reveal that sardines and other fish (with fast life cycles, planktonic larval stage and low habitat dependence) are highly vulnerable to changes in ocean temperature, and therefore represent “an exceptional bioindicator to measure the direction and speed of climate change expected in the near future”, points out Montero-Serra.

Subtropicalization of North Sea species

Due to the accelerated increase in temperature of the continental seas, sardines and anchovies (with a typically subtropical distribution) have increased their presence in the North Sea “even venturing into the Baltic Sea”, confirms Montero-Serra, who adds that the species with a more northern distribution (like the herring and the sprat) have decreased their presence.

The analysis is therefore a clear sign that species in the North Sea and Baltic Sea are “becoming subtropical […] where sardines, anchovies, mackerel and horse mackerel, more related to higher temperatures, have increased their presence”, says the researcher.

This is due to the pelagic fish being highly dependent on environmental temperatures at different stages of their life cycle: from reproductive migrations and egg-laying, to development and survival of larvae.

According to researchers, the changes in such an important ecological group “will have an effect on the structure and functioning of the whole ecosystem”. The expert warns that coastal towns that are highly dependent on these fishery resources “must adapt to the new ecological contexts and the possible consequences of these changes”, although they still do not know the scale of the socio-economic and ecological repercussions.