The Blob (Pacific Ocean)

The Blob is a large mass of relatively warm water in the Pacific Ocean off the coast of North America that was first detected in late 2013 and continued to spread throughout 2014 and 2015.

[8][9] The Blob was first detected in October 2013[10] and early 2014 by Nicholas Bond and his colleagues at the Joint Institute for the Study of the Atmosphere and Ocean of the University of Washington.

It was detected when a large circular body of seawater did not cool as expected and remained much warmer than the average normal temperatures for that location and season.

[1] The implementation of China's clean air action plan in 2013 may have inadvertently contributed to the Blob, by removing pollution that had blocked and scattered heat from the Sun.

[25] NASA climatologist William Patzert predicts that if the PDO is at work here, there will be widespread climatological consequences and southern California and the American south may be in for a period of high precipitation with an increase in the rate of global warming.

He believes the unusually warm water is due to the persistent area of high pressure stationary over the northeastern Pacific Ocean.

Dan Cayan of the Scripps Institution of Oceanography is unsure about the ultimate cause of the phenomenon, but states "there's no doubt that this anomaly in sea surface temperature is very meaningful".

[1] Sea surface temperature anomalies are a physical indicator which adversely affect the zooplankton (mainly copepods) in the northeast Pacific Ocean and specifically in the Coastal Upwelling Domain.

[28] The Northwest Fisheries Science Center in Seattle predicted reduced catches of coho and Chinook salmon, a major contributing factor being the raised temperatures of seawater in the Blob.

[31] The discovery of a skipjack tuna (Katsuwonus pelamis), primarily a fish of warm tropical waters, off Copper River, in Alaska, 200 miles (320 km) north of the previous geographic limit, and a dead sooty storm-petrel (Oceanodroma tristrami), a species native to Northern Asia and Hawaii, along with a few brown boobies (Sula leucogaster) in the Farallon Islands of California, besides other such records, has led marine biologists to worry that the food web across the Pacific is in danger of disruption.

Additionally they found anomalous sea surface pressure SSP, with a peak magnitude approaching 10 hPa, a record high value for the years of 1949–2014.