Arctic Science Journeys
Radio Script
1997

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Alaska Waters Heat Up
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STORY: Sitting in his basement, windowless office at the University of Alaska in Fairbanks--some 350 miles from the nearest ocean--oceanographer Tom Weingartner can see just how warm the North Pacific Ocean became this summer.

His amazing view comes from color-enhanced images downloaded from an Internet site run by the U.S. Navy. The images, taken by satellite, show the temperatures of the sea surface. The world's oceans appear as a mosaic of blue, green, yellow and red. The blue represents cold water. Warm water shows up as red. Throughout the summer, red water dominated the Gulf of Alaska and Bering Sea.

WEINGARTNER: "What's happening right now is there is very intense warming occurring over the central and eastern equatorial Pacific, and that's on the order of three degrees or so above normal, maybe even three to five degrees above normal. But there's also very strong warming occurring up in the Gulf of Alaska, particularly along the coast and out into the Bering Sea as well, and also off the west coast of the United States."

Warm waters off Alaska come on the heels of the biggest El Niño in more than 50 years. El Niños are unusually warm ocean currents that occur periodically in the South Pacific. The currents disrupt global weather patterns and trigger massive storms and droughts.

But scientists aren't ready to say El Niño is warming the North Pacific. Dan Cobb is a forecaster with the National Weather Service in Fairbanks, Alaska.

COBB: "The El Niño has nothing to do with sea surface temperatures in the Gulf of Alaska. There's large lag times in the ocean between warm water in one place and it arriving in another place. They're not directly related. There's other things going on as well. El Niño is not the only game in town, in other words."

The other game in town, according to the University of Alaska's Tom Weingartner, is not nearly so dramatic. Weingartner says weather, not El Niño, is to blame for heating up the Gulf of Alaska and the Bering Sea.

WEINGARTNER: "I think what's going on at least in the ocean is the ocean's response to the atmosphere, not a signal that's being propagated up in the ocean from lower latitudes, from in the tropics. That is something I think we will eventually see, but I wouldn't expect we'll see that until next summer or spring."

Weingartner says winds in the gulf this summer were light. Cloud cover also was sparse. Combined, the two allowed more of the sun's energy to heat up the ocean.

During a typical summer, Alaska waters hover around 54 degrees Fahrenheit, or about 16 degrees Celsius. But according to researchers, waters off Alaska this summer have been as much as ten degrees above normal. So warm that fishermen have been catching tropical fish like marlin, tuna and blue sharks. Bruce Wing is a research biologist at the National Marine Fisheries Service in Juneau, Alaska.

WING: "I think what's happening is we're getting a broader warmer influence so that fish like the blue sharks--they're not finding the sharp temperature boundaries that they normally do so that they are probably wandering over and in closer to shore than where we here in the Gulf of Alaska usually see them."

With fewer salmon to catch this year and prices for them low anyway, fishermen aren't complaining about their tuna windfall.

OUTRO: For Arctic Science Journeys, this is Robert Hannon reporting from Fairbanks, Alaska.