Farallon Institute Newsletter - Spring 2024
Around the office — Earth Day 2024
Join us at the 2024 Santa Rosa Earth Day festival, which is a free, family-friendly event to raise environmental awareness. Farallon Institute is participating in this year’s festival with information and activities about seabirds and their important roles as indicators of marine ecosystems and the health of our oceans. The festival will be on Saturday April 20, noon to 4 p.m., in Courthouse Square in downtown Santa Rosa. In addition to environmental exhibits, there will be food and live performing arts.
State of the ocean — California
As we move into March, most of the West Coast is coming out of a pretty rainy winter and welcomes the emergence of spring with the blooming wildflowers. There is connectivity between the land and ocean, and much of the weather patterns that we’ve been experiencing are a result of what’s happening in the oceans. For example, though predicted to be a very wet year because of the strong El Niño event in the tropics, Northern California had a relatively standard year in terms of rainfall, which, in comparison with last year's deluge, is not very much. Southern California, however, has had a much wetter year than usual, with many areas receiving over 10 inches of precipitation so far! In terms of snowfall, the Sierras were below average until a recent snowstorm at the beginning of March that brought the statewide average snowpack up to 68 inches as of March 21 (or 97% of a standard year to-date; Figure below). We will continue to see how precipitation for the rest of March and April–May shapes up.
The El Niño that started in 2023 has continued to remain steady. Global ocean temperatures remain well above average, with the West Coast experiencing just slightly above normal sea surface temperatures since the beginning of the year. Interestingly, the National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) is forecasting that by the end of 2024, we will shift back into La Niña conditions. This kind of switch from El Niño straight into a La Niña has occurred before, most recently in 2016 when the strong El Niño ended in April 2016 and by was followed by La Niña in August. This flip-flop of climate conditions has major effects on the oceans and lands. As we move into the upwelling season here in California, we will be intently watching what happens with the ocean, and for any effects of the diminishing El Niño.
Figure. Snow depth for the West Coast of the US from March 21. Source: Windy.com ECMWF model (European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts).
Sculpture at the ‘Isla Negra’ Museum House of the Nobel Laureate poet Pablo Neruda, on the central Chilean coast. Photo courtesy of Marisol García-Reyes.
The allure of the Chilean coast
This winter, FI researcher Marisol García-Reyes traveled to Chile to participate in a project, led by UC Davis researcher Fernanda Valdovinos, to investigate how coastal ecosystems respond to upwelling, which is the vertical movement of ocean waters near the coast. Upwelling ecosystems are found on the west coasts of California, South Africa, and Chile. This project aims to understand and predict how intertidal ecosystems worldwide function, and thus how they might respond to climate change effects on upwelling systems. During this trip, Marisol also met with collaborators from another project, led by San Francisco State University researcher Ellen Hines, on bycatch of marine mammals in Chilean waters. Researchers on this project previously met in Patagonia to work on modeling the risk of marine mammal incidental catch (when marine mammals are accidentally caught during fishing).
These two projects are extending our understanding of how ecosystems, similar to ours in California, are impacted by different climates and human activities, as well as expanding our network of collaborators. In addition, Marisol gave a seminar at the Pontífica Universidad Católica de Chile coastal research institute and met with graduate students from its marine program who are interested in replicating research the Farallon Institute is doing for the California Current, but in the Humboldt Current. Since both ecosystems are upwelling ecosystems, they share similar stresses from global and regional climate, such as El Niño events. International collaboration will benefit us all by increasing our understanding of climate influences in our backyard in comparison with other similar areas across the globe.
Sea surface temperature anomalies (difference from normal; °C) in May 2015 in the Northeast Pacific. Image from Gentemann et al. 2017 Geophysical Research Letters.
Warming oceans and marine heatwaves
The global ocean has been absorbing heat due to climate change…a lot of it! In fact, because water can hold about 1000 times more heat than the same volume of air, almost all the warming caused by climate change is now held in the oceans. Without the ocean to absorb warming, our average global air temperature would be 122°F as opposed to our current 59°F. However, we just reached a new benchmark in global ocean warming: for a full year now (March 2023 through March 2024), the daily average global ocean temperature has been at a record high every single day (see image below). Part of this warming is attributed to the ongoing, now dissipating El Niño event (see above), which warms ocean waters regionally, but anthropogenic (i.e., human-caused) global warming is also contributing substantially. The ongoing ecological impacts are particularly strong in coral reef and kelp forest ecosystems, and on the declining extent of sea ice coverage in polar regions.
With their increasing occurrence in recent decades, it is no surprise that the term “marine heatwave” is now a common expression in marine science and the popular media. Observing global ocean surface temperature is a fairly routine job these days—satellites measure the temperature of the surface of the ocean, and they provide these data for the entire planet almost every day (for where there is no cloud cover). With these measurements, we could see that during marine heatwave in 2014–2016 (known as “The Blob”; see top image), the Northeast Pacific was almost 9°F warmer than usual. The impacts on ecosystems along the U.S. West Coast were profound: it destroyed kelp forests, caused mass mortality of seabirds and marine mammals, and increased the occurrence and magnitude of harmful algal blooms. A new research paper, however, reports that up to half of marine heatwaves actually have little to no surface signature at all because they occur well below the surface, in deeper waters, and cannot be measured by satellites. This means that our monitoring of the oceans cannot detect about half of all marine heatwaves that occur. This has big implications for how we assess climate change impacts on marine life that lives in the deep sea, and how we manage ocean resources.