In December 2020, a ring of warm water nearly 60 miles wide broke away from the Gulf Stream and displaced cold-water species sustaining many of New England’s commercial fisheries. Thanks to a WHOI data-collection effort, one cohort of fishermen detected the temperature spike and moved to more fruitful fishing grounds.
The northeast U.S. continental shelf break, where the intrusion was detected, is a fertile fishing area where nutrient-rich waters support a long list of commercially important species including Jonah crab, Atlantic cod, and black sea bass. In 2014, it became the focal point of a partnership between WHOI and the Commercial Fisheries Research Foundation (CFRF) in Rhode Island. That partnership, called the Shelf Fleet Research Program, arms a rotation of six fishing vessels with a suite of scientific sensors to expand observations of a rapidly warming part of the Atlantic Ocean.
“We give them equipment and the tools to collect real-time data—whether it’s biological data on lobster and crab, or oceanographic, where they’re getting temperature, salinity, and depth information,” says Aubrey Ellertson, a research biologist and CFRF’s program liaison.
Since 2014, fleet members have used WHOI-provided smart tablets to wirelessly acquire data in real time—an Etch-A-Sketch of crisscrossing environmental information.
In the beginning, Ellertson says, data were quietly transferred to WHOI once the boats came ashore. Later, “data dump” presentations by WHOI physical oceanographer Glen Gawarkiewicz helped them confidently translate these abstract lines into helpful clues for fishing.
Read more at: Woods Hold Oceanographic Institution