How “The Blob” affected groundfish distributions in the Gulf of Alaska
Yang, Q., E. D. Cokelet, P. J. Stabeno, L. Li, A. B. Hollowed, W. A. Palsson, N. A. Bond, and S. J. Barbeaux (2019): How "The Blob" affected groundfish distributions in the Gulf of Alaska. Fish. Oceanogr. https://doi.org/10.1111/fog.12422
In 2014-2016, a marine heat wave, also known as the Blob, produced abnormally warm waters off the US West Coast and in the Gulf of Alaska.
This diagram shows that Pacific cod were caught deeper in warm years (red dots), and shallower in cold years (blue dots), than in near-average years (black dots, average temperature ±1 standard deviation). This is a plot of the deviations in the depth about the mean depth where Pacific cod were caught versus the bottom temperature anomaly (the difference between the temperature in a single year and the multi-year average temperature). The larger the dot, the longer the fish (see scale at top right).
