Saving Seafood

El Niño Yields to Upwelling in the California Current, Renewing Productivity of West Coast Ecosystem

March 10, 2025 — According to the NOAA California Current Integrated Ecosystem Assessment’s annual report, the California Current Ecosystem pulled out of a strong El Niño pattern in 2024. That El Niño delayed the onset of the annual spring upwelling of nutrient-laden water that, was nevertheless strong enough to fuel the rich West Coast ecosystem and improv environmental conditions  for salmon.

NOAA Fisheries scientists presented the report to the Pacific Fishery Management Council to inform upcoming decisions on fishing seasons. The report provides a snapshot of ocean conditions, fish population abundance and habitat, and fisheries landings and fishing communities’ conditions. It gives short-term forecasts and longer term projections of how conditions across the ecosystem may evolve in 2025 and beyond.

Report Highlights

  • Upwelling resumed even more strongly and consistently than normal, supplying a greater influx of nutrient-rich waters that improved forage conditions for many species
  • Productive waters supported abundant forage speciessuch as anchovy and krill and strong production of young hake and juvenile rockfish that could contribute to commercial fisheries in future years
  • Improved freshwater streamflows should support survival of juvenile salmon migrating downstream in California to the ocean
  • California sea lions found enough prey amid the El Niño warming, while experiencing harmful algal blooms that led to premature birth of pups and strandings along the coast

“Each year we learn more about how this marine ecosystem functions and what we should be watching to anticipate change,” said Andrew Leising, a research oceanographer at NOAA Fisheries’ Southwest Fisheries Science Center who coauthored the new report. “We’re getting better at forecasting what is coming at us, at the same time we see some new twists.”

Read the full article at NOAA Fisheries

La Niña may end soon. What that may mean for temperatures and hurricanes.

March 8, 2025 — A long-awaited La Niña finally arrived in the Pacific Ocean in January. But less than two months later, the picture is rapidly shifting.

The World Meteorological Organization announced Thursday that the ongoing La Niña event is expected to be short-lived and that there is a 60 percent chance it will fade by May.

The pattern is the foil of the better-known El Niño and is typically known for cooling a vast swath of the Pacific Ocean. But the phenomenon has done little to break the cycle of excessive global heat that dominated during 2024 and has continued into 2025 — except in the United States. And now, signs are emerging that could spell a coming end to the pattern, raising questions about what could come next — including whether yet another record-warm year for the planet could be in the cards.

Meanwhile, a new and unexpected pattern of warming oceans in the eastern Pacific, west of South America, has sent sea temperatures soaring to more than 5 degrees above average. Called a coastal El Niño, or El Niño Costero, the pattern can affect weather near and far. Coastal El Niño events in 2017 and 2023 caused flooding rains and high rates of dengue fever in Peru.

Read the full article at The Washington Post

Hoping to protect turtles, feds announce limited fishing restrictions off West Coast

June 2, 2024 — In an effort to protect endangered loggerhead sea turtles, the National Marine Fisheries Service announced on Thursday that fishing with large-mesh drift gillnets will be prohibited in federal waters off the coast of Southern California from the beginning of June until the end of August.

The announcement was made after officials determined that El Niño weather conditions are happening in Southern California.

El Niño causes a variety of weather effects across the United States — including warmer water in the Pacific and in turn less phytoplankton for fish to eat, disrupting the food chain of sea creatures that eat those fish.

Large-mesh drift gillnets are sometimes miles-long nets used to catch fish like swordfish. They can inadvertently catch other sea creatures like whales, dolphins, sharks and turtles.

Read the full article at Courthouse News Service

Annual ocean conference raises $11.3b in pledges for marine conservation

April 20, 2024 — From April 15-17, state delegates, organization representatives, academics and philanthropists met at the 9th Our Ocean Conference (OOC) in Athens to discuss the protection of the world’s oceans and pledge actions to safeguard their future.

As the OOC took place, news broke about the world’s coral reefs undergoing a mass bleaching event, which lent a sense of urgency to the conference. Experts say this global bleaching event is a result of the current El Niño climate pattern as well as the ongoing rise in global ocean temperatures due to human-induced climate change.

“Devastating but also predictable,” is how Melissa Wright, a senior member of the environment team at Bloomberg Philanthropies, which funds ocean conservation work, described the bleaching event at the conference’s opening press briefing. She urged leaders to take “decisive action” on climate change as well as other threats such as overfishing, pollution and development.

Read the full article at Mongabay

Ocean warming: more than just corals and sea level rise

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

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

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

Read the full article at the Daily Progress

 

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

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

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

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

Read the full article at Popular Science

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Read the full article at the Oregon Capital Chronicle 

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

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

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

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

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

Read the full story at the Merced Sun-Star

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

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

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

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

El Nino is bad news for salmon and steelhead

June 15, 2023 — The little troublemaker is back.

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

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

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

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

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

Read the full article at the Spokesman Review