Fisheries-Oceanography Coordinated Investigations (FOCI)

ATTENDANCE

• November 20-22: NSF Bering Sea Inner Front Meeting at PMEL in the Oceanographer Room (Seminar Room). Presentations on Thursday (11/20) will last from 8:30 am until sometime in the afternoon. The focus is on productivity of the inner shelf and relates to bird breeding and feeding. Contact Phyllis Stabeno or Jim Schumacher for more information.
• December 3: Sandra Werner will give a seminar at the UW on some of her thesis research with Robert Beardsley. Her seminar will begin at 12:30 at a location to be announced. She has been using field data from Georges Bank to describe the tidal boundary layer and compare the field results to numerical model predictions.
• December 4-5: Bering Sea Ecosystem Workshop in Anchorage, Alaska for the purpose of presenting research programs. The Department of Interior, NOAA, and the State of Alaska are all involved with this workshop.
• December 8-9: review of ‘97 ESDIM projects. This will be held at PMEL.
• December 15-16: the principal investigators of the Southeast Bering Sea Carrying Capacity program will meet at Battelle.
• January 8: Fisheries oceanography symposium to be held at the Asian Centre Auditorium, University of British Columbia. Registration is $75 by December 1, 1997. It is expected that this one-day seminar will result in a book.
• Tiffany Vance has submitted an article to EOS about the anomalous conditions in the Bering Sea this past summer. The article can be viewed at http://rho.pmel.noaa.gov/vance/seawifs/eos.html.
• Jeff Napp and Ric Brodeur successfully petitioned the PICES organization for the formation of a micronekton working group. This group will materialize in one year and is expected to concentrate on ecosystem and sampling-technique questions.
• Jim Schumacher noted that there may be some future opportunities for monitoring programs in the northern Gulf of Alaska through Prince William Sound and Exxon Valdez research funds.

• Ric Brodeur briefly reported on field activities during 9MF97, the September biological cruise aboard the Miller Freeman. Sampling along the standard four transects around the Pribilof Islands included CTD casts and concentrated sampling at and around tidal fronts. Along Line A, thermal conditions were similar to that observed during previous years but salinity stratification was weak. Similar to previous years, chlorophyll concentration peaked at or just offshore of the front along Line A. Although the ROV worked well, poor visibility caused by an extensive and long-lasting coccolithophore bloom hampered viewing of age-0 pollock at depths less than 50 m. Catches of age-0 pollock in either the Methot or Anchovy trawls suggested that densities of age-0 pollock along the four transects were less than observed during 1996.
• Phyllis Stabeno reported that her monitoring cruise was hampered by poor weather, and Moorings 3 and 4 were not successfully recovered. Mooring 2 (in 70 m of water off of Cape Newenham) has now yielded three years of data. For the month of April, conditions this year were similar to past years but were very different for the month of May due to mixing caused by a strong late-May storm. During 1997, the vertical density gradient was weak and was mostly due to temperature, surface temperatures peaked in August at about 15 C. Two new types of sensors were attached to the moorings to record turbidity and PAR measurements. Ron Reed commented that these data indicate that anomalous conditions in the Bering Sea this year are likely to be associated with atmospheric forcing as opposed to El Niño effects translated through the ocean. Jim Schumacher noted that the large temporal variability observed at Mooring 2 underscores the importance of monitoring programs.
• Three cruises are planned for the Shelikof area next spring and summer. The first will be in early May and will focus on eddies, as agreed during this summer’s Shelikof Strait PI workshop. The eddy study group will develop a sampling plan for the cruise for consideration by FOCI PIs at the December 11 meeting. Expected complications include eddy formation and detection, so satellite images, drifters, and CTD measurements will be an integral part of this cruise, as will be ship-to-shore communications. The second cruise will occur during late May and will be the standard late-larval survey. The third cruise will be aboard the Wecoma during late June, but objectives are not yet determined. A committee consisting of Ric Brodeur (chair), Kevin Bailey, Matt Wilson, and Allen Macklin will develop options for the cruise and report at the next meeting.
• Having data from three Shelikof Strait cruises next spring offers FOCI the opportunity to refine the conceptual model of survival. Birthdate distributions of pollock larvae obtained during these cruises will be analyzed. Periods of high mortality may become apparent from the analyses and could be related to measured changes in the environment.
• Some FOCI PIs have submitted a proposal to NOAA/OAR to monitor ocean conditions in the western Gulf of Alaska that would provide definition of the spatial and temporal extent of this year’s El Nino. If funded, this work will bring critical resources, e.g., satellite-tracked drifters, to this year’s Shelikof Strait work without requiring more than about a day of ship time during each cruise.

Please mail corrections and additions to the FOCI Coordinator.

U.S. Dept. of Commerce / NOAA / OAR / ERL / PMEL