Exceptionally warm ocean conditions are impacting BC marine life.
Pacific Salmon Foundation - Salmon Blog, Wednesday, 05 August 2015
The warm and dry weather that British Columbia has experienced this spring and summer is due in part to exceptionally warm ocean conditions.
Typically atmospheric patterns over the Pacific Ocean generate winter storms that cool the surface layer by mixing it with deeper water. In the fall of 2013, atmospheric conditions deflected the strong winter storms northwards into Alaska and the Canadian far north. In the absence of these storms the surface waters in the NE Pacific got warmer and warmer, so that by the spring of 2014 water temperatures were more than 3 °C above normal in an area larger than British Columbia and Alberta combined. Such warm conditions have not been seen in this region since open-ocean temperature record keeping in the NE Pacific began in 1948.
In the fall of 2014, the winds from the west resumed and blew this warm surface water to the coast of North America causing record high sea surface water temperatures during the winter of 2014 and the spring of 2015. These ocean conditions warmed the atmosphere and helped to create the dry weather conditions that British Columbia has experienced for the past several months...
Read the full blog here: https://www.psf.ca/blog/exceptionally-warm-ocean-conditions-are-impacting-bc-marine-life
