Back to the Topic as Presented! Come on GasBlaster, get real! Get Maine!
This piece is from 2018
"The Gulf of Maine recorded its second-warmest day on record on Aug. 8.
The average sea-surface temperature that day was only 0.05 degrees Fahrenheit below the all-time record high.
The gulf is warming faster than 99 percent of the global ocean, scientists said.
The warming waters are disrupting the marine ecosystem in that region, which includes lobsters and whales.
As if this summer's heat on land isn't enough, sea-surface temperatures in the Gulf of Maine soared to near-record highs in August in what scientists referred to as a month-long "marine heat wave" in the typically colder waters off the New England coast.
Scientists at the Gulf of Maine Research Institute (GMRI) in Portland, Maine, released an analysis on Aug. 30, determining that the Gulf of Maine officially experienced its second-warmest day on Aug. 8 in satellite-data records dating back to 1981.
NOAA and NASA satellites measured an average sea-surface temperature of 68.93 degrees Fahrenheit in the Gulf of Maine on Aug. 8, only 0.05 degrees below the all-time record high of 68.98 set in 2012.
The Gulf of Maine waters are warming faster than most of the Earth's oceans, according to the GMRI analysis.
During one 10-day period in August, the average sea-surface temperature in the Gulf of Maine was nearly 5 degrees above the average from 1982 to 2011, said GMRI Chief Scientist Dr. Andrew Pershing. There were other prolonged stretches this summer that were also a few degrees higher than the long-term average, he added......”
“......The warming of the gulf is happening at a time when the center of the U.S. lobster population appears to be tracking northward. The country's lobster catch is still high, but rising temperatures threaten to "continue to disrupt the marine ecosystem in this region," John Bruno, a marine ecologist with the University of North Carolina who was not involved in Pershing's work, told the Associated Press.
"Warming in the Gulf of Maine has been pushing out native species like cod, kelp and lobster and fostering populations of species typically found in the Carolinas," Bruno told the AP. "Although it's an extreme example, it mirrors what we're seeing across most of the world."
The Gulf of Maine has seen temperatures above the 90th percentile for more than five consecutive days this year, which constitutes a "marine heat wave," Pershing said in the press release. The gulf set 10 daily temperature records this summer after setting 18 over the winter, he added.
The warming waters are bad news for the rare right whales because it impacts the availability of tiny organisms they eat, Jeffrey Runge, a research scientist with GMRI and the University of Maine, told the AP. It's symptomatic of warming oceans all over the world, he added.
"There are very large, not regional, drivers for this change," Runge told the AP. "Until we work on the global drivers of warming, I don't see any way to stop this.”
https://weather.com/news/news/2018-09-05-gulf-of-maine-near-record-highs-ocean-heat-wave
