Posted by Raghu Murtugudde on December 03, 2001 at 10:17:51:
I just returned from Hawaii after a IRI/IPRC working group
meeting on Climate and Fisheries. The idea of understanding the
regional and local manifestations of global scale climate
variability is absolutely essential for quantifying the
connections from ocean triads (enrichment, concentration, and
retention) to fisheries. Hawaiin Ridge Current is of importance
for the role it may play in the local fish habitat. The first step
in such an exercise to understand the dynamics of this current
and Leonardi et al. present such a study. The work by Jeff
Polovina and others on the tuna and other fisheries around Hawaii
and the recent work by Shang-Ping Xie et al. on the extent of the
coupled climate interactions in the wake of Hawaiin island chains
need to be put in the context of such detailed oceanic processes.
This also provides an opportunity for large scale modelers and
climate/fisheries scientists to relate to the vast body of valuable
work by the observational and theoretical oceanographers.
As for the details of the Leonardi et al.'s poster itself, I will
not belabor the points presented by them. But I think the next
step should be to look at the interannual and longer time-scale
variability of the North Hawaiin Ridge Current and synthesize the
model results with in-situ and remotely sensed observations
such as altimetric sea levels, ocean color, and scatterometer
winds.