For 35 years, the Pacific Ocean has largely spared West’s mountain snow from effects of global warming

Washington state’s Mount Shuksan in February 2014.

A new study has found that a pattern of ocean temperatures and atmospheric circulation has offset most of the impact of global warming on mountain snowpack in the western U.S. since the 1980s. The study from Oregon State University, the University of Washington and Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory was published Jan. 11 in Geophysical Research Letters. “The western U.S. has received a big assist from natural variability over the past 35 years,” said lead author Nick Siler at Oregon State University, who began thinking about the project as a doctoral student in atmospheric sciences at the UW.

Shift in large-scale Atlantic circulation causes lower-oxygen water to invade Canada's Gulf of St. Lawrence

The Gulf of St. Lawrence has warmed and lost oxygen faster than almost anywhere else in the global oceans. The broad, biologically rich waterway in Eastern Canada drains North America’s Great Lakes and is popular with fishing boats, whales and tourists. A new study led by the University of Washington looks at the causes of this rapid deoxygenation and links it to two of the ocean’s most powerful currents: the Gulf Stream and the Labrador Current.

John Horne named director of JISAO

John Horne, director of the Joint Institute for the Study of the Atmosphere and Ocean (JISAO)

UW’s College of the Environment is pleased to announce that John Horne has been named director of the Joint Institute for the Study of the Atmosphere and Ocean (JISAO) for a three-year term, effective August 1, 2018. Horne is a professor in the School of Aquatic and Fishery Sciences and a fisheries biologist who uses acoustical techniques to understand spatial structures, interactions and abundances of aquatic communities, which are used to inform resource management.

Civil War-era U.S. Navy ships’ logs to be explored for climate data, maritime history

Coaling Admiral Farragut’s fleet at Baton Rouge, Louisiana, circa 1862.

A new grant will let a University of Washington-based project add a new fleet to its quest to learn more about past climate from the records of long-gone mariners. The UW is among the winners of the 2017 “Digitizing Hidden Special Collections and Archives” awards, announced Jan. 4 by the Washington, D.C.-based Council on Library and Information Resources. The new $482,018 grant to the UW, the U.S.

Ocean conditions contributed to unprecedented 2015 toxic algal bloom

A magnified image of Pseudo-nitzschia australis, which dominated the 2015 bloom.

A study led by researchers at the University of Washington and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration connects the unprecedented West Coast toxic algal bloom of 2015 that closed fisheries from southern California to northern British Columbia to the unusually warm ocean conditions — nicknamed “the blob” — in winter and spring of that year. “We have toxic algae events that result in shellfish closures off the Washington and Oregon coast every three to five years or so, but none of them have been as large as this one,” said lead author Ryan McCabe, a research scientist at the UW’s Joint Institute for the Study of the Atmosphere and Ocean, a collaborative center with NOAA.