[Recording] This conference will now be recorded.
 
[Emily Lemagie] This seminar is part of NOAA's EcoFOCI bi-annual seminar series. Focused on the ecosystems of the North Pacific Ocean, Bering Sea, and U.S Arctic to improve understanding of ecosystem dynamics and applications of that understanding to the management of living marine resources.
Since 1986 the seminar has provided an opportunity for research scientists and practitioners to meet, present and provoke conversation on subjects pertaining to fisheries-oceanography or related issues in Alaska's marine ecosystems. Visit the EcoFOCI Webpage for more information.
Ah, we sincerely thank you for joining us today as we conclude our all virtual series this fall. After the New Year look for our spring speaker lineup, via the OneNOAA Seminar Series and the NOAA PMEL calendar of events. Did you miss a seminar? Catch up on the PMEL's YouTube page. It takes a few weeks to get these posted but all seminars will be posted. Please check that your microphones are muted and that you're not using video during the talk. Please feel free to type your questions into the chat, and I will be monitoring these questions and we'll address these at the end of the two talks.
 
Today I am pleased to introduce Nicholas Bond. Nick is the Washington State Climatologist. Most of his work has been done with FOCI and has focused on variability and climate and atmospheric forcing of the Bering Sea, the topographical effects on coastal winds in Alaska. And Libby Logerwell is a Supervisory Research Fisheries Biologist at the Alaska Fisheries Science Center. She is active in promotion of the ecosystem-based management nationally and internationally, through her involvement with the Arctic Council, the North Pacific Marine Science Organization, and the International
Council for the Exploration of the Sea.

And with that let's begin.
[Nicholas Bond] All right thanks. 

Nick here. I trust you've been admiring this first slide and I want you to think about whether this gives you more insight into how the North Pacific works: atmospheric, ocean, and the interactions and so forth, versus, what's shown in the schematic in the next slide. Here and this is a rather complicated schematic having to do with interactions between the ENSO phenomenon and atmospheric teleconnections and the response, in the mid-latitude. 
 
 
So, which are you getting more insight out of, and which one do you think is more correct?
 
Oh, so think about that. All right, next slide. So, what I'm going to be talking about today is just kind of my own change in thinking, over the last decade. Plus something about how the North Pacific works.
Excellent.

And you know how did we get to this, the more or less present situation with, you know cold water obviously, across the, in terms of SST, across the equatorial Pacific. And warm waters in the Central Pacific.
And note the really warm waters, south of the Aleutians and we'll have a little bit more about that in a minute. Next slide. Okay so what I want to, oh it does work, what I really want to talk about here are these three paradigms that basically dominated my thinking at least about the North Pacific some time ago.

And we're going to briefly but quickly review them here in the next few minutes. And in particular the first one has to do with this idea that the ENSO phenomena, El Nino Southern Oscillation, through its impacts, chiefly on atmospheric patterns and higher latitudes, the response is to the dominant modes of upper ocean variability in the North Pacific, the PDO and the NPGO. And so in essence the PDO and NPGO is a rectified response to ENSO.

A second one that is among the climate community is kind of, if not dogma, is generally accepted that the upper ocean is more a slave rather than a much of a forcing of the lower atmosphere variability over the North Pacific. And finally, this last one here that the PDO is, you know, 
useful, for our purposes.

Thank you and it's not working. All right. [Indisinct]

All right. Ok.

And so this, with regards to that first paradigm, the idea is here that at the bottom of this schematic, on what's happening, the different kinds of ENSO events, whether they're focused in the eastern tropical Pacific, versus the central or tropical Pacific, end up creating these systematic, atmospheric pressure and wind anomalies. That then, in turn, the ocean responds to. And Manu 
Di Lorenzo to his credit

synthesizing knowledge of the various work that's been done here has you know, put together this schematic. One fault that I would take with this is that all the arrows are of the same size and in reality we actually know that some of these linkages are a lot more direct and robust than other ones.

Let's talk about the PDO first. Just, many folks know about it, but babies are born every day that haven't heard about the PDO, right? [Laughter] And in particular when there's, in the positive state there's warm ocean temperatures, the color fill here, in the tropical Pacific. 
And of course you have them along the West Coast of North America. The contours, the air, show the sea level pressure relative to normal, with a deeper than normal Aleutian low displaced to the southeast. So this is, there's a kind of the canonical PDO SSC and SLP
pattern.

Just a little bit more about it, it's kind of repeated here in the upper left in terms of the SST distribution. A time series forward is shown in the upper right. For the second mode of variability which now typically is considered the NPGO,
Jim Overland and I did some work in the late 90s after the PDO ended a long stretch of mostly being in the positive phase, there I got the name the Victoria Mode, but I think it's now it's basically considered that the NPGO's used more and it has a pattern that's orthogonal there to the PDO.

And this is a bit of an aside, but I know some of the folks that are a part of this talk are probably interested about what's going on in the North Pacific right now, in particular, just south of the Aleutians. And what is being recognized is some of these, the SST anomalies actually extend quite deep, into the ocean. And not all of them. And in particular the anomaly that's there, south of the central Aleutians of [indistinct]
box that's indicated. Can you see the time series in the bottom left there, that those temperature anomalies are extended down below 200 meters

And so what is, what impacts the temperatures at the subsurface can be different of course then they're at the surface. And there's a kind of starting to be at least some increased attention on that. And for example, if you look again at the PDO in terms of an SST based index, versus on the upper left, versus the lower left one that has to do with the heat content of the upper 300 meters, they're very similar to one another, but of course the greater amount of thermal inertia with the depth/average temperatures shows a much slower cycle.

Or unless you have a year of variability.
All right. But what I really want to get at here, is this paradigm that, okay ENSO atmospheric teleconnection, changes in the Aleutians low and that's how the, the ocean temperatures respond. There's some really interesting work that's been done by a new research scientist in the AtSci department at the UW, Rob Wills. Who has used a kind of a technique that hasn't been used very often, called low frequency component analysis. I'm not going to get into it too much, the details, but the idea there is he's trying to separate out the modes based on their time scale of variability.

And argues that there's a mixture of those modes, if you don't do it right. And so in particular there's the LFP 1 that shows basically the climate change mode, right? You can see its time series over the last 100 plus years, temperatures are rising in the North Pacific. Okay. So that's very slow mode. His mode, his version of the PDO PDO star shows the typical pattern in the PDO. 

It's shown in the upper right and the time series that is generally associated with that. And then finally he has a kind of a different kind of ENSO modes, of focusing on the, the higher frequency variability there. Then again, very much looks like Nino 3.4 index, the big events in '82, '83, '97, '98, so forth. The key part of his analysis, I feel like I did--is the sea level pressure anomalies.

Think of one of your cookies here, ah there we go, associated with these three different, kind of leaning modes of variability, the way that
he's teased it out. And in the upper middle there, is the kind of global warming mode that shows basically, slight changes in rises and sea level pressure over the mid-latitude oceans. Kind of lowering pressures over land where it's warming up faster, it makes sense. 
When you look at the sea level pressures on the left, regressed on these two different PDO indices, so at the bottom the traditional one. And in the middle there this this new one, they look very much the same. Deep pollution low, you get a positive PDO and you know vice versa. What's key here is when you look at the response to El Nino and La Nina in this new way that instead of the lower right, a large response in terms of the Aleutian lows, with respect
to ENSO, there's a much more muted response with this new way of looking at. 
And what makes the argument that yeah, this connection between the Aleutian low and the PDO is really strong, but El Ninos, La Nina events don't actually, when you look at it the right way, don't express it strongly on North Pacific atmospheric variability as other folks have tried to, you know, argue.

You know just recent support for that is if you look at pressure anomaly maps of the last four winters these numbers here, the 0.8 minus 1.0 and so forth, have to do with the Nino 3.4 index. Last two winters Nino, La Nina winters, you know what La Nina means, it's Spanish for The Nina.

[Laughter]

Higher pressure than usual over the North Pacific but here in a week, weekly warm in a situation three years ago, it looked kind of the same but when there was actually a weak to moderate El Nino four years ago, that doesn't look like the mirror of these images, it's just so an example of, how this pattern isn't as robust as maybe we've all claimed it is.
 
All right. So, that's paradigm number one.
The next one I'm going to go over really briefly and the first one over this second one in my list, is the idea that the ocean is a slave to the atmosphere. And here I'm using some work from a recent graduate in the AtSci department at UW, who looked at the marine heat wave in the Northeast Pacific in 2014 to '16, The Blob. And in particular, why how did it last so long? If you have a massive anomalously cold or warm water, you can see it's gonna generally, all things being equal, tomorrow it's going to radiate more heat away. If it's colder,
it's not going to radiate as much heat to the atmosphere as it would, and so what helped maintain that. And what she showed over the course of the two plus years that it lasted, that sure enough the surface flux is to cool the ocean, once it got hot. And that makes sense, that the, you know the atmospheric variability coming by the atmosphere, kind of reset itself. 

And so the ocean there was a cooling effect, just losing the heat mostly for evaporative cooling. But, what also happened was that the atmosphere responded to the ocean in the way of the cloudiness. That warmer ocean meant, less low stratus clouds, more high clouds, and it/in a kind of a warmer, more moist atmosphere in general, and what that meant was that there was greater downward long wave flux in the atmosphere due to the atmosphere's response to the ocean, less net cloudiness, more shortwave getting down to the ocean surface. And while it was warm and radiating more heat upwards in the net the, the effect of the at, the ocean on the atmosphere, meant fewer clouds more radiative heating and a mechanism for, you know, maintaining the heat wave. 

And we, we've actually seen that some other spots also. 

All right, last point and then I definitely wanted to give Libby enough time here, is this whole idea about the PDO is really useful for you know kind of characterizing the physical system, for fishery purposes. Mike Litzow has done, some work on this that I think is very Illuminating.

I've tagged along on some of it. And in particular when the charts here shown on the left, show for three different eras, what the relationship was between the PDO and various salmon catches in Alaskan Waters.
Four different species were considered to really do this properly, I would say. And so essentially there was there's a different kind of relationship it used to be the catch anomalies, and the PDO in these different eras. And so any sort of relationship you have based on money or obviously you can get a work, necessarily very well for the other one.
Another way of looking at that is just the correlations between sea surface temperature patterns and catch, during these various eras in Alaskan waters, during that 1965 and 1988 period. Warm temperatures were better for salmon, the the red colors there just nothing much during that '89 to 2013. And then it kind of reversed here in the 2014-2019 period. And so the relationships between the SST distribute, anomaly distributions, and the salmon catches - because we're not stationary at all. It actually makes sense in this act or perhaps goes back to you know maybe the first point there, when you look at the atmospheric forcing patterns vis-a-vis these indices during the different eras.

And here I just kind of going to concentrate here on the, kind of earlier era, up to 1988 and the 13, 14 years after that. And in particular when the PDO was positive in the earlier era, the sea level pressure anomalies were close to the Alaska Peninsula. In the later era they were displaced much further to the southeast so there was a different pattern vis-a-vis the PDO, in the two different periods. Same thing for the NPGO, you know with the charts after writing showing kind of the difference between the two eras. And so, the screaming message is, you know non-stationary relationships both in the physics here and apparently in at least in one, way that's manifested in terms of biology.

All right so my last slide here, I could say that by this first paradigm it's by no means settled. Here just, you know,the, but overall I think the idea that the PDO is just a result of a low pass filtered ENSO, there's some real problems with that.

So we still have to sort this out and there's a lot more to it. There's some evidence that at least in the thermodynamics that the atmosphere really does care what the ocean is like underneath in the in the mid-latitudes in the North Pacific and, and then finally that, don't put all your eggs in the PDO basket. And with that, I think uh we could turn it over to Libby.

I could have some questions.
[Emily Lemagie] Yeah, let's take some questions, while we do a transition over, if you have any questions from the chat or the audience?

[Participant] So Nick, regarding your second point here, so if it's not totally slave to the atmosphere, what, what does the ocean do?
I think you showed example of the cloud...

[Nicholas Bond] Yes.
[Participant] ...feedback. Other than that?

[Nicholas Bond] Yeah, I'm glad, so the question was, I, you know, to the extent that the ocean is not a slave to the atmosphere and actually have some important, you know impacts on the atmosphere, yeah yeah certainly in the thermodynamics, it does where the atmospheric boundary layer, in a way kind of equilibrates to the, the ocean temperatures below.

And so yeah definitely in the thermodynamics, in terms of how it impacts pressure patterns in the winds, that's more complicated. And it turns out probably in the Western Pacific there's a little bit of a response of that sort.
So I think you should think of it, is that the atmosphere clearly responds thermodynamically. And maybe to an extent, in terms of its circulation anomalies. But probably to a lesser extent.

Our temperatures in Western Washington are impacted by ocean temperatures, go along the coast. When we have a really warm ocean of The Blob years that's the year we had the warmest winter on record, and terrible snowpack. So that's no coincidence. Any question online or...
[Participant] Yeah, if you can hear me?

[Emily Lemagie] Yes, we can hear you.
[Participant] Oh good. You know, I'm, this isn't my area of expertise so I may struggle here a little bit with the concept. Yeah the, I've always understood it to be that the Aleutian low pretty much dictated the weather pattern in the Bering Sea and the Gulf of Alaska. And as the Aleutian low weakened, another front and I saw this in a couple papers called the 'Ridiculously Resilient Ridge', apparently the front from California and the North Pacific moved in to take its place. And kept the Aleutian low at bay, and supported that warm Blob event.

Those terminologies are different, than what you're using here. But is that Ridiculously Resilient Ridge part of the PDO? And, uh...
[Nicholas Bond] You know, it's manifestation in The Blob, not really. But you hit on an important point that's worth emphasizing that there is a very robust relationship. However the Aleutian low gets deep or a higher pressure than normal, weaker than normal, there will definitely be a response in the ocean, systematic response in the ocean, associated with it. I mean help settling winds, there's going to be warmer air temperatures, Emily Hayden showed that in the EcoFOCI seminar, some weeks ago from

the Bering Sea. The key there is what makes that Aleutian low either strong or weak? And that's the part that the new evidence is suggesting and so may be not playing this systematic a role as we once thought.
Once you have an Aleutian low that's deep you're going to have, a fairly, you can know what the weather's going to be like in Alaska and what the SST response is going to be. 
[Participant] So is it right, is it incorrect to just to make it short? In the Aleutian low is going to allow for warm water events like the warm Blob to persist?
[Nicholas Bond] Yes, it wasn't, quite the class PDO pattern that was at least the onset of The Blob, and we don't have enough time to get into the distinctions there. But yeah certainly a deeper Aleutian low you tend to have more warm air, maritime origin pumped up into Alaskan waters and the continental Alaska and that leads to warm conditions.
[Participant] Thank you, sir. 

[Emily Lemagie] Thank you. Thank you so much for your question. We can take some more questions at the end. 
But I would like to introduce Libby Logerwell.

[Nicholas Bond] Thanks.

[Libby Logerwell] Well, hello everyone. Good to see you. And nice to see the online audience as well. 

Let's go ahead and get started. Next slide please.

I'm Libby Logerwell and I was very fortunate to be part of the author team on The 5th National Climate Assessment. We'll be talking about that today and I'd like to acknowledge the Alaska Chapter lead Henry Huntington and this whole suite of excellent folks that helped me in this chapter.
So here's my 'and, but, therefore' slide.

So, climate change is a global crisis and has the potential to impact all facets of society. But many publications about climate change are not accessible to the non-science public. Therefore, it is critical that information on climate change and the impacts on society be provided in a way that the non-science public can understand and appreciate. 

So that's actually going to be the focus of the first part of my talk, is how we wrote the Alaska Chapter, the assessment to facilitate understanding and appreciation. And then I'm going to talk about some examples where EcoFOCI science was brought in to the assessment.

So what is the National Climate Assessment? The agency responsible could be such; the assessment is the U.S. Global Change Research Program. That's a national program that coordinates the work of these 13 federal agencies, you see here.
The assessment is published about every four years and the target audience is first of all the President and Congress. But also the public as broadly as possible. The assessment is divided up into sections. The first part is about the physical science. So, climate trends and earth system processes. And then there are a number of sections, on sections, on national topics.
So, atmospheric stuff, there's information on terrestrial processes, marine coastal and offshore. Section on the economy, society, ecosystems and also the human dimension. Health and even international interests. And then there are regional sections. So there's a Northwest U.S, Southwest, Northeast, Southeast, Middle, Central and then Hawaii, and Alaska. So, Alaska gets it's own territory. And that's the one I was lucky to help write.

Thanks.
So, as I said, 
I'm going to talk about how we wrote the chapter to facilitate public appreciation and understanding. So we kind of inverted the typical structure of the narrative, about climate change effects on society. So typically when we talk about climate change effects we go, this is what happened in the atmosphere it affected the ocean it affected temperature and salinity, primary production we work our way up the trophic chain to humans. For the assessment we did that backwards, so we started with what are the societal impacts that we re seeing. 
Then we discussed the climate drivers and then you know, down to the physics. The other thing we did is arrange our sections within the Alaska chapter not by trophic level or atmosphere-ocean, but by these key messages that again are very societal. So our health, communities, our livelihoods, our built environment, our natural environment and then our future. We wanted to have something that was a little bit optimistic about what we might see in the future. What adaptations might be possible.

And I work mostly on the, our livelihoods section, Alaska commercial fisheries and also on our natural environment. I'm going to tell you a little bit more about those two sections.

So our livelihood, this is kind of how the story went. We first said climate impacts have had severe social economic consequences. For instance there have been fishery restrictions, closures and federally defined fishery disaster. The way the mechanisms, as far as the biology of the fishing crab have been through their growth, survival, distribution, phenology, etc. And then the ocean climate processes have been warming but have contributed to these, have been warming, loss of sea ice, marine heat waves, etc.

And then we close with some suggestions about potential adaptations to a future like this. So changes in science survey, timing and locations. Also ways that the industry can adapt through harvest timing and targets and also the whole idea to be managed. So you can see how that's a little bit backwards from climate change impact to fisheries.

So the other key message I worked on was our natural environment. And this is kind of how the story went in that section. We said ecosystem goods and services have been and are likely to be diminished by climate change. And climate change has impacted fish, crabs, seabirds and marine mammals. I should say that there's also a terrestrial analog to these, the story. 
I'm just telling you the marine stuff. So climate change has impacted these marine ecosystem goods and services, on that the things that have impacted the entire food web are ocean warming, record low sea ice, and ocean acidification. And our recommendation is that careful management of Alaska's resources is necessary to avoid any additional anthropogenic stress, in addition to climate change.

Some other things we did to make the story more compelling is, clearly there's a trend in climate change and policy, but we really wanted to focus on extremes and notable events. And this is a very rough first draft of a figure that you will see in the assessment. And we picked up some kind of recent highlights. So for instance, The Blob, which we heard about. We also talk about, for instance record low winter sea ice in 2018. And as I said, there were also terrestrial examples in the chapter, so for instance the heat wave in southwest Alaska or this Arctic terrestrial summer high precipitation and flooding.

Another figure we're going to have is kind of mirroring that, some major recent ecological changes. So you're familiar with a lot of these, for instance The Blob-driven specific Pacific Cod collapse or unusual mortality events of seals and seabirds in the Bering Sea. Or like maybe here changes in the distribution and migration of moose and caribou. So again we're hoping this will make the chapter more compelling to the public at large.

The other thing we've done is throughout the sections we've scattered in stories. So this is a story I think that comes in the hour of the eco-environment section. And it talks about how the Gulf of Alaska fishery had very poor returns. It's a salmon fishery in 2021. So we have quotes from different people involved in this fisheries. So from George Anderson, who's a resident, talked about how they had something they took for granted, the fish were always going to be there for smoking, salting, freezing. And to have that not be there is something they weren't prepared for.

In the story, they also talk about how Alaska native communities really rely on salmon, not just for food but as important cultural connections to places and family.
So that's just one example of a story. There's also been a lot of opportunities for public input at the very beginning. So for instance in January 2022, before we even wrote the first draft we had these public engagement workshops. They were free and open to the public, we started off by providing an overview of the program and the Climate Change Assessment process. And we discussed with the audience potential topics and priority issues. And talked about sharing resources, information about what's going on.

And we asked them how would you use a National Climate assessment? What would you like to know? And we held these workshops in plenary and breakout, and the breakouts were really interesting. I had a very great discussion. My group really focused on extreme events which you can see became a key topic in the assessment and also the need for monitoring. It's a lot of discussion about that.

So, if you're interested in getting involved you can, in a number of different ways. The job is out for public comment now so you can go to this website and provide your comments. You're welcome to contact me or Henry Huntington, the chapter lead, if you have any thoughts. And then finally, there's a really cool opportunity, they're having an art and climate competition. Both for under 18 artists and adult artists. Go here and you can see and you can submit some original artwork to be considered, to be included in the assessment.

Okay and I think now, I'm going to talk about science.

Just couldn't resist. [Laughs] So EcoFOCI research is gathered throughout the climate assessment. I'm just going to talk about two examples. So one, following the Gulf of Alaska Blob, and then also arctic food web responses to
recent warming extremes. Next slide.

So, we know about The Blob, thank you Nick, for the introduction to that. For those of you who don't know here's our study area in the Gulf of Alaska. We use the anomalies of sea surface temperature showing warming throughout the year, starting around 2015.

Next slide. And I m going to show a bunch of work, on a bunch, from a bunch of different people, and oh, the citation went away for this. Let me see, let's go back a slide. 

Ok good, yeah, here's the names. So all the different authors that contributed to this work: Lauren Rogers, Matt Wilson, Janet Duffy-Anderson,
Dave Kimmel, and Jesse Lamb. 

Now we'll go next. So that extreme warming had effect on juvenile pollock density, productivity and mortality. So the top slide here is larval density and age-0 density in 2015. You can see it's quite low, relative to other years. And then larval productivity also very low. And then mortality from age-0 to larvae was quite high.
Next, Pollock condition. Age-0 during fall, very low in 2015.
Next slide. And the pollock diet was affected. So, here we have diet in 2013 before the warming, in 2015 when it was warming. And this is diet by size of fish, from 30 millimeters to 80. And I want you to focus on the red bars, that's the large energy-rich Euphausiids. And here are the smaller copepods and over. And you can see that for all but the largest fish there was a decrease in Euphausiids in the diet that were forming. Then, an increase in our smaller body copepods.

Next please. And that had effect on Pollock bioenergetics. So this slide shows the daily ration required for positive growth. For 50 millimeter fish, 60 millimeter and 70 millimeter. 2013 to 2015. 
We can see for all sizes the ration was higher in the warmer year. This colored bars represents the amount of that increase in the ration that was due to an increase in temperature. That will increase the ration, a change in diet, lower in the energy dense prey, and then change in body weight. And so you can see especially for the smaller fish that change in temperature and diet, is really important. And then finally, the next thing/example, moving up to the Arctic, is Artic food web response to recent warm extremes.
So here we are now moving up to the Chukchi Sea. These are sea surface temperature anomalies on the Chukchi Shelf, starting around 2015 and forward. Also anomalously warm conditions.
Next please. And that had an effect throughout the Arctic food chain. So starting with copepods, this is work by Adam Spear and Dave Kimmel, there was a decline in the large body, the Calanus glacialis. So here's a scale bar for reference. So a decline in large body calanus and an increase in small body pseudocalanus. And that had an effect up the food chain, on the predators of those planktons so Arctic Cod had a significant impacts on their, so this is work by Louise Copeman. Shows morphometric condition, lipid density, storage lipids, and then a marker specific to Calanus prey. So warm, before the warming 2013 and then two years of warm conditions, '17 and '19. 

So though there was no change in metric condition, there was a decrease in lipid density, a decrease in the amount of storage lipids and a decrease in the markers for Calanus copepod prey.

So...Going up the food chain, next slide. True, not just for Arctic Cod, but for other Arctic forage fish. this is work by Johanna Page. So you can see like in this warm period here, this is the residual of length to energy density relationships.

And you can see that in this current warm phase, this energy density residual was low across most of these taxa. And this pattern is somewhat similar, which Johanna interprets to mean there's some kind of common move-up effect thinking about those copepods.

Next slide. Going further up the food chain, there were seabird die-offs in the Bering Strait region. So this figure shows the encounter rate of dead birds on beaches, from 2009 to 2020. This shows survey efforts so you can see that they increase the number of birds found it's not due to an increase in survey effort. And these last three years had quite a number of dead birds found on the beach.
Next slide. Also seeing a decline in ice seal

pup condition in the northern Bering Sea, this is spotted seal, females and males, condition of adults. Some adults and pups, and you see it in the pup body condition, which is probably a reflection of the mother's forage resources. Pups or not weaned yet but they're relying on [indistinct] condition going down, the mother's probably having a hard time finding sufficient food to provision herself.
Ok, next slide. Okay so, that's it.

[Laughter] Thank you for your attention.
[Applause]

[Emily Lemagie] Thank you, so much.
We do have a question in the chat from James.

He's asking about what the future time schedule. What is future time schedule, and it was right around when you were talking about beginning half of your, before you got into the science.
 
[Emily Lemagie] James can you elaborate? While we wait for that we can take any other questions we might have.
[Participant] It could be the review period.

[Jim Overland] Yeah, what's the time schedule for the publication of the report?

[Libby Logerwell] Good question, thanks Jim. The report should be published in about

a year, so fall 2023.

[Nicholas Bond] But the review period,
it doesn't go on for that much longer.

[Libby Logerwell] No, I think it's the end of January.

[Nicholas Bond] Yeah. Yeah.

[Libby Logerwell] Yeah, so if you want
do, get your comments in, do it now.

[Emily Lemagie] We have another
question in chat from Heather.

Are there any indigenous or local
authors on the report?

[Libby Logerwell] Yes. Definitely. Yeah.

We rely heavily on our indigenous and local colleagues for the stories.

You know really trying to focus on the human impact. So yeah definitely a big part of the team.

[Participant] Thanks.
[Emily Lemagie] Go ahead.

[Participant] Is there going to be any targeted outreach for disseminating this report to communities?
[Libby Logerwell] Yeah, good question. So the question was whether it will be targeted outreach for disseminating this report to the communities? 
We actually have a meeting next week. We have an outreach coordinator and we're starting to put together some ideas
for that. So, if anybody has any ideas for where, to help get the message out. I would be happy to chat with you.

[Jim Overland] Yeah, Libby you might want to talk some more to Gay Sheffield about the societal impact if you haven't already.
The, uh, NOAA Administrator when he was in Alaska was really impressed by the fact that the processing plant had shut down because of lack of 
product, basically crab and Yukon salmon.

[Libby Logerwell] Great. Good suggestion.
Thank you.

[Emily Lemagie] We have another question from Nate. 
Thank you Nick and Libby. You both mentioned the importance of recent extreme events for having impacts on ecosystems and fisheries. Can you talk more about the seasonal variations of which extremes have been most impactful? Spring, summer, winter, fall, I've been really surprised by recent extremes in summer, and how impactful they've been.

[Libby Logerwell] Nick. Do you have any thoughts on
that one, while I think about it?

[Nicholas Bond] Yeah not a simple question.

Yeah, one thing. One size doesn't fit all clearly. And so there would be, we know for example in the Being Sea, the key how sea ice is in the winter is really important.

But conceivably other times of year, spring conditions in the Gulf of Alaska and you know whether you get a cysteine bloom or something might be, you know more important in those waters. And so that's not much of an answer, but that's what I can come up with.

[Libby Logerwell] Yeah, that's a good response. I think that clearly the first thing I think of is spring productivity
affects extreme events on that, but yeah, fall conditions and how any extremes in the fall are going to affect the whole winter survival for a lot of species.
And in the terrestrial, yeah, for sure. All seasons are important in terrestrial when you talk about permafrost . 
There's melting in the terrestrial and how that affects you know winter travel over land.

So I think all seasons are important and it's a really good point that it was brought up, because we could talk about that and make it clear that there are seasonal phenomena

embedded in the trend and in the extremes. Really good point. 
Something to maybe bring forward a little bit more on the assessment, is to make it clear which season we're talking about.
People would appreciate that. They'd like to know, is this going to affect me in the spring or the fall? It's going to really affect how I respond to this. So yeah, that's a really good point. That's a great question.

[Emily Lemagie] We had a lot of interest in the science, art, and climate in the chat.

[Libby Logerwell] Awesome!
[Emily Lemagie] Lots of good points in the chat, seems like a hit.

[Participant] Question for Nick.

Residual from your talk.
[Nicholas Bond] Okay.

[Participant] I've been pondering, it's a philosophical question I guess. If the PDO is driven by fundamentally different mechanisms in different phases, errands and it has different ecosystem responses and different regimes Is it still, should we still call it an index?
Or should it be...?

[Nicholas Bond] I think it still is useful in a very gross
sense for encapsulating the state

of the North Pacific, upper ocean temperatures.

But it, it can manifest, that doesn't mean that it manifests in the exact same way all the time.

And in particular it manifested in, at least importantly different ways you know

earlier era versus a later era from, you know a salmon perspective.

And so, yeah I don't think it should be abandoned. But it's just yeah a single index isn't going to do the trick.

[Participant] So we need somebody to develop
new indices that capture the different states?

[Nicholas Bond] Well I'm not sure if it's,
you can do it with indices.

But I'll almost need to, you need to know the,
you know kind of what the distributions have

looked like because there's a PDO
could have been plus 1.2 and just,

at particular spots and be different conditions even though the index was the same.

And, yeah I guess in principle if you had enough indices you could you could fully describe it, but at a certain point it's just enough's enough!

Hope that helps.

[Participant] So I had a follow-up question on that. So in the Wills Analysis the first mode that came out, was the climate change trend. Correct?
[Nicholas Bond] That's right.

[Participant] So is that the dominant driver of what's going on now, in the sense that the future is...
[Nicholas Bond] Yeah, the order of those modes and I didn't explain that, was not by the variance explained, but just sorted by time scale. And so that was the longest time scale.
[Participant] Right, ok.

[Nicholas Bond] As you can see from the time series basically you know rising temperatures is like, there's a, less polite way to put it but
no lie. If you know what I mean and I think you do.

[Indistinct]
[Laughter]

[Emily Lemagie] Well, those were some great questions. We're coming up on time.

So I'm going to end the seminar and the recording.

Thank you both to our speakers for presenting and we will see you next season and spring for the next seminar series. Thank you.