Saving Seafood

El Niño has officially begun. Here’s what that means for the U.S.

June 13, 2023 — El Niño is officially here, and that means things are about to get even hotter. The natural climate phenomenon is marked by warmer ocean temperatures in the equatorial Pacific, which drives hotter weather around the world.

“[El Niño] could lead to new records for temperatures,” says Michelle L’Heureux, a climate scientist at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s Climate Prediction Center.

The hottest years on record tend to happen during El Niño. It’s one of the most obvious ways that El Niño, which is a natural climate pattern, exacerbates the effects of climate change, which is caused by humans burning fossil fuels and releasing greenhouse gasses into the atmosphere.

Read the full article at NPR

El Niño’s arrival is imminent; 90% chance it lasts all year, forecasters say

May 11, 2023– El Niño is likely to take over soon — and odds are it will be sticking around for a long time, national forecasters said in an update Thursday.

While the Northern Hemisphere is still under “ENSO-neutral” conditions — meaning we are neither in an El Niño nor La Niña — that could change at any time. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s Climate Prediction Center said there is about an 80% chance the transition to El Niño takes place between May and July.

Once it takes hold, El Niño is likely to strengthen into the fall and winter, when it normally peaks. The odds of it lasting until February of 2024 are upwards of 90%, the Climate Prediction Center said.

Read the full article at Fox 8

Looming El Nino might be bad news for ocean life

April 26, 2023 — An El Nino is likely coming, and it’s set to be unusual in a couple of ways.

It also has the potential to wreak havoc on marine ecosystems, according to a climate research scientist with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.

Dillon Amaya with the NOAA said global ocean temperatures are already at record highs, and an El Nino can trigger additional ocean warming.

For example, he wrote in a recent article published by The Conversation, some fish increase their metabolism in warm waters by so much that they burn energy faster than they can eat, and they can die.

Read the full article at NBC 24

El Niño is coming, and ocean temps are already at record highs – that can spell disaster for fish and corals

April 18, 2023 — It’s coming. Winds are weakening along the equatorial Pacific Ocean. Heat is building beneath the ocean surface. By July, most forecast models agree that the climate system’s biggest player – El Niño – will return for the first time in nearly four years.

El Niño is one side of the climatic coin called the El Niño-Southern Oscillation, or ENSO. It’s the heads to La Niña’s tails.

During El Niño, a swath of ocean stretching 6,000 miles (about 10,000 kilometers) westward off the coast of Ecuador warms for months on end, typically by 2 to 4 degrees Fahrenheit (about 1 to 2 degrees Celsius). A few degrees may not seem like much, but in that part of the world, it’s more than enough to completely reorganize wind, rainfall and temperature patterns all over the planet.

Read the full article at The Conversation

El Niño watch issued by NOAA’s Climate Prediction Center

April 16, 2023 — El Niño, a recurring climate pattern that periodically disrupts entire ecosystems of marine life and can influence weather events in the United States and across the globe, will “likely develop” again this summer, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) announced on Thursday.

The agency’s climate prediction center had earlier issued an El Niño Watch as part of its latest weather outlook assessment for April 2023, which forecasted the upcoming shift in ENSO, the acronym scientists use to describe an alternating system of contrasting climate phenomena called the El Niño-Southern Oscillation cycle. This kind of advisory is issued when weather conditions favor the development of El Niño within the next six months, according to NOAA.

Weather conditions are currently considered neutral, as they have been since a particularly lengthy term of La Niña — El Niño’s converse, which is often associated with worsening drought and more severe hurricanes — ended at the beginning of March. At the time, climate scientists said there was an estimated 60% chance that El Niño would emerge by the fall season.

Read the full article at CBS News

An El Niño is forecast for 2023. How much coral will bleach this time?

February 3, 2023 — Scientists remember the years between 2014 and 2017 as a particularly bad time for coral reefs. Elevated temperatures fueled by an El Niño climate pattern harmed about three-quarters of the world’s reefs in both hemispheres, forcing corals to release their life-sustaining zooxanthellae and turning them ghostly white in a process known as coral bleaching. About 30% of the world’s corals died as a result of this bleaching. Others have yet to fully recover.

And now, at a time when global temperatures are higher than ever since the industrial era began due to human-driven climate change, forecasters predict another El Niño will kick off later this year. If they are correct, this El Niño could further escalate global temperatures, causing significant damage to both terrestrial and marine ecosystems, including the world’s coral reefs, most of which are already struggling to cope with environmental stressors such as pollution, overfishing and warming water.

So, what’s the likelihood of this happening?

An El Niño is forecast for 2023 — but it’s not certain

For the past two and a half years, the world has been experiencing the opposite of an El Niño: a La Niña climate pattern, a condition that generally brings cooler sea and atmospheric temperatures.

But according to the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), the climate is expected to transition to a neutral state by May 2023, and then possibly move into an El Niño phase, a period characterized by warmer sea conditions. The shift between La Niña and El Niño is part of a naturally occurring process known as the El Niño Southern Oscillation (ENSO), but this pattern is unfurling in a world destabilized by climate change.

The probability of an El Niño occurring this year is under debate. NOAA has suggested that there is about a 50% probability of an El Niño developing by the Northern Hemisphere’s autumn months. The U.K.’s Meteorological Office says there is a 60-70% probability that an El Niño will develop around July this year, and the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research (PIK) in Germany says the probability of a moderate to severe El Niño this year is close to 90%.

One thing that’s certain is that even if an El Niño doesn’t arrive in 2023, it won’t be too long before one does. The current La Niña has been going on for more than two years already, and they typically switch with El Niños every three to seven years, on average.

Read the full article at Mongabay

Transition into El Nino could lead to record heat around globe

January 30, 2023 — When the world’s largest and deepest ocean basin warms, satellites will be busy over the Pacific Ocean detecting analogous water temperatures but also, if history repeats itself, landmasses across the globe will have to deal with heat that could be record-breaking.

Since reliable technology started keeping track of world temperatures in the 1950s, the warmest year of any decade were periods dominated by an El Niño event, and the coldest were from La Niñas.

“During El Niño, unusually warm sea surface temperatures in the central/eastern tropical Pacific lead to increased evaporation and cooling of the ocean. At the same time, the increased cloudiness blocks more sunlight from entering the ocean. When water vapor condenses and forms clouds, heat is released into the atmosphere. So, during El Niño, there is less heating of the ocean and more heating of the atmosphere than normal,” National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration experts wrote in a 2022 ENSO blog.

Read the full article at Fox Weather

Assessing El Niño’s impact on fisheries and aquaculture around the world

April 27, 2020 — While considerable resources are invested in seasonal forecasts and early-warning systems for food security, not enough is known about El Niño’s impact on the fisheries and aquaculture sectors, even though its name was given in the 1600s by fishers off the coast of Peru.

To remedy that, FAO is publishing, in partnership with French National Research Institute for Sustainable Development (IRD France), the report El Niño Southern Oscillation (ENSO) effects on fisheries and aquaculture. This report captures the current state of knowledge on the impacts of ENSO events across sectors, from  to safety at sea, from fish biology and fishing operation to management measures.

El Niño is widely known as a climate pattern that begins over the Pacific Ocean but wreaks havoc on ecosystems in land and water far away from its origin. Its consequences include droughts and major harvest shortfalls in large swatches of Africa and Indonesia, forest fires in Australia, and serious flooding in South America.

ENSOs are often simplified to reflect two main phases: El Niño, an anomalous warming phase in the central and/or eastern equatorial Pacific Ocean, and an opposite cooling phase called La Niña.

Read the full story at PHYS.org

Climate warming promises more frequent extreme El Niño events

October 22, 2019 — El Niño events cause serious shifts in weather patterns across the globe, and an important question that scientists have sought to answer is: how will climate change affect the generation of strong El Niño events? A new study, published today in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Science by a team of international climate researchers led by Bin Wang of the University of Hawaii’s International Pacific Research Center (IPRC), has an answer to that question. Results show that since the late 1970’s, climate change effects have shifted the El Niño onset location from the eastern Pacific to the western Pacific and caused more frequent extreme El Niño events. Continued warming over the western Pacific warm pool promises conditions that will trigger more extreme events in the future.

The team examined details of 33 El Niño events from 1901 to 2017, evaluating for each event the onset location of the warming, its evolution, and its ultimate strength. By grouping the common developmental features of the events, the team was able to identify four types of El Niño, each with distinct onset and strengthening patterns. Looking across time, they found a decided shift in behavior since the late 1970’s: all events beginning in the eastern Pacific occurred prior to that time, while all events originating in the western-central Pacific happened since then. They also found that four of five identified extreme El Niño events formed after 1970.

Wang and his co-authors focused on the factors that seemed to be controlling these shifts, including increased  in the western Pacific warm pool and the easterly winds in the central Pacific, and found that with continued , those factors may lead to a continued increase in frequency in extreme El Niño events.

Read the full story at PHYS.org

West Coast Fisheries Worried El Nino Likely to Return in 2018-19

August 31, 2018 — SEAFOOD NEWS — As salmon and tuna seasons wind down and Dungeness crabbers start thinking about the winter fishery on the West Coast, some wonder: Will El Niño return?

Recent news articles have reported a 70 percent chance of warm waters in the equatorial Pacific will affect the West Coast.

On land, that could mean a dry winter coming after a summer and fall in which smoke from wildfires filled the skies in the West. On the ocean, it could mean warmer waters that may temporarily disrupt an environment that is accustomed to cooler waters. Some fisheries could benefit months or years after an El Niño. Others — some the most commercially important — may have difficult seasons ahead.

“In summary, there is ~60 percent chance of El Niño in the Northern Hemisphere [of] fall 2018 (September-November), increasing to ~70 percent during winter 2018-19,” the National Weather Service’s Climate Prediction Center wrote in an El Nino/Southern Oscillation (ENSO) Diagnostic Discussion earlier this month.

However, each El Niño and warm water period is different and creates effects to varying degrees. The extreme warm water period in 2015-16, “The Blob,” proved disastrous to Dungeness and rock crab fisheries because harmful algal blooms thrived. It also hampered the ocean survivability of coho salmon. In years past, pink shrimp populations plummeted but then bounced back after El Niño events.

“When El Niño is developing … short-term fluctuations in the near-surface winds [in the Pacific] can have substantial effects,” Emily Becker wrote on a Climate.gov blog in early August. “A period of weaker trade winds can help build El Niño’s warmer surface waters, while a period of stronger trade winds can cool the surface and impede El Niño’s growth. It appears that the trade winds are currently weakening, and may continue to do so through the next week, likely helping push things in the El Niño direction.”

Weather forecasters caution that making any predictions beyond a week to 10 days is uncertain. The Climate Prediction Center will make its next El Niño report and update in mid-September.

This story originally appeared on Seafood News, it is republished here with permission.