The Pacific Fishery Management Council manages fisheries off the coast of California, Oregon, and Washington, for about 119 species of ground fish, salmon, coastal pelagic species, and highly migratory species. The Pacific Fishery Management Council has requested that its Ecosystem Plan Development Team provide annual State of the California Current Ecosystem Reports. The reports include observed indicators of environmental conditions in the California Current that affect the productivity and distribution of harvested fish populations.

Using our J-SCOPE ocean condition predictions, here we can forecast many of these California Current environmental conditions and indicators, including:

• Regional Upwelling Indices, which drive local primary production. Two wind products are reported here. The first is the 8-day Upwelling Index. The average of all three model runs making up the ensemble are plotted in the solid line with the range of the ensemble runs shown as a gray cloud around that line. The upwelling season began before these April-initialized forecasts. The January forecasts called for an earlier than the climatological average (reported by NOAA on April 13th) of the upwelling season. The upwelling season is forecasted to persist through approximately October 1st, but this is likely an overestimate of the duration of upwelling (see 2013, Year in Review).

• Dissolved oxygen levels and hypoxic events
• Ocean conditions relevant to coastal pelagic species and salmon distribution or abundance

Complementary forecasting tools provide forecasts of basin-scale climate indicators:

• Multivariate ENSO Index. The April 2015 CFS forecast suggests El Niño conditions over the summer of 2015, with stronger El Niño conditions favored thereafter.

• Pacific Decadal Oscillation. The June 2015 CFS forecast suggests a continuation of the positive phase of the PDO conditions into 2015.