Pacific Anamolies

Had the chance to attend the Pacific Anamolies Workshop at the University of Washington last week. I went with two goals:

1) get the latest on the progression of this year's positive ENSO event, and particularly anything relevant to its coastal impacts on the west coast of the U.S. Turns out that most of the ENSO stuff presented was mostly focused on temperature, not so much on coastal impacts...but it was interesting none-the-less. The full proceedings of the workshop can be viewed here: http://uwtv.org/pacificanomaliesworkshoptwo/

2) Try to connect some very warm temperature observations we've made at Elwha to other datasets from around the Pacific. That is the topic of the poster I presented (see above), and was somewhat fruitful.

In the poster above I label three "events" measured at depths of ~30 to 60 feet in the central Strait of Juan de Fuca. Event "C", and the winter that proceeded, was the one that everyone had in their data, and everyone was talking about. This was associated with the on-shore movement of the infamous "Blob" in the fall of 2014. The on-shore movement of this warm water elevated temperatures in the Strait of Juan de Fuca (and in Puget Sound, and BC for that matter) for the whole winter...by a lot.

Events "A" and "B" in that record remain somewhat of a mystery, even though they were pretty darn warm events that each lasted about a week. And again, this is at depth, not at the surface. Still trying to figure out those two.