Causes for the 2013-2016 record Marine Heatwave in the NE Pacific

Between the winters of 2013/14 and 2014/15 the northeast Pacific experienced its largest marine heatwave on record. The extraordinary warming persisted into 2015/2016 under the influence of an extreme El Niño event. Here Nate will review the extent to which regional atmospheric forcing of the NE Pacific marine heat wave was related to known atmospheric teleconnections between El Niño, the Pacific Decadal Oscillation, and the North Pacific Gyre Oscillation. Nate will review the dramatic shift in Pacific climate that followed the end of the 2016 El Niño that included a brief reappearance of the dreaded Blob, and then the exceptionally wet winter of 2017. Nate will conclude by discussing the influences of natural and human-caused climate change in this period.

Speaker: Nate Mantua, Landscape Ecology Team Leader, Southwest Fisheries Science Center, National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration