A handful of hyper-productive fisheries provide sustenance to a billion people and employ tens of millions.
A handful of hyper-productive fisheries provide sustenance to a billion people and employ tens of millions. These fisheries occur on the eastern edges of the world's oceans — off the West Coast of the U.S., the Canary Islands, Peru, Chile, and Benguela. There, a process called upwelling brings cold water and nutrients to the surface, which in turn supports large numbers of larger sea creatures that humans depend on for sustenance.
A new project led by researchers at Texas A&M University is seeking to understand how changes to the climate and oceans will impact fisheries in the U.S. and around the world.
"We're interested in how climate change is going to alter upwelling and how the sustainability of the future fisheries will be impacted," said Ping Chang, Louis & Elizabeth Scherck Chair in Oceanography at Texas A&M University (TAMU). "It turns out that when we increase the resolution of our climate models, we find that the upwelling simulation becomes much closer to reality."
Read more at University of Texas at Austin, Texas Advanced Computing Center
Image: Projected change (defined as the mean over the future period of 2071–2100 minus the mean over the historical period of 1991–2020) of alongshore wind stress (×10−2 N m−2) shown in longitude-latitude plane (upper) for CCS (a), CUS (b), P-CUS (c, d), BUS (e), and projected change of wind stress curl (×10−7 N m−3) (middle) for CCS (f), CUS (g), P-CUS (h, i), BUS(j). Credit: Chang, P., Xu, G., Kurian, J. et al.
