In New England, Catching Climate Data Along With Fish. (New York Times)
Excerpt from this New York Times story:
When Bob Hersey Jr., a Maine lobsterman, pulls up his traps, he gets more than tasty crustaceans. He’s collecting vital details about the changing ocean environment.
Mr. Hersey, who also dives for sea urchins, is among nearly 150 fishermen who have installed temperature sensors on their traps or trawl nets from Maine to North Carolina as part of a program run by a nonprofit organization with help from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.
The soda-can-size sensors are dragged along the seafloor, giving fishermen and scientists a three-dimensional map of the ocean rather than just conditions on the surface, which can be checked using satellites or thermometers on boats. The data is continuously collected and fed into regional weather and climate models.
“The fishing industry can collect data that nobody else can get to,” said George Maynard, a marine resource management specialist at the National Marine Fisheries Service, a branch of NOAA. “It’s a cheap way to collect a lot of oceanographic data to improve those models.”
The sensors record water temperature and oxygen levels and soon they will also record salinity, an important indicator of large-scale changes in ocean currents that influence weather patterns.
While the data is valuable to researchers, it’s also helping Mr. Hersey and others decide the best places to fish.
“I’m trying to figure out how to be more efficient,” said Mr. Hersey, 55, who has deployed four sensors on his 600 lobster traps and has been studying the temperature changes in relation to the size of his catches. “I’m trying to establish a pattern of where they are with a certain temperature.”
In late 2024, the Gulf of Maine started cooling after nearly 15 years of gradual warming, a trend that is expected to last for the next decade, according to a peer-reviewed study published in the journal Geophysical Research Letters.
This cooling trend is occurring because the Gulf Stream, which brings warmer salty water from the tropics as it flows along the East Coast, has shifted slightly to the south and the east, allowing cooler water from Greenland to flow into the Gulf of Maine, according Andrew Ross, an author of the study and a climate modeler at the Geophysical Fluid Dynamics Laboratory, which is part of NOAA.
Cooler water does not mean that climate warming has reversed, Dr. Ross said. “We struggled with how we wanted to describe it,” he said. “We came up with a temporary pause or a predictive pause.”
Normally, a cooling trend would be great news for the New England fishing industry, but it has thrown fishermen, regulators and even scientists into a bit of a tailspin. Regulators are trying to anticipate what this pause in warming might mean for each species. Fishermen have started using different gear to catch new species, and they wonder how best to invest for the future.
