Just in time for Christmas, we have a valuable addition to our menu of ocean observations - FishSOOP. Run by Moninya Roughan's team at UNSW, FishSOOP serves up temperature profiles in near-real time, fresh from the decks of fishing vessels operating in many regions around the country. FishSOOP observations are mostly (but not exclusively) in waters less than about 200 m deep, so they complement the Argo array perfectly.
The FishSOOP program nets very many observations, but they aren't everywhere. You have four ways of seeing if there are any in your region of interest. Initially, you should browse our FishSOOP landing page (linked from our home page), where there is a Data Finder, explanatory material, and some use cases, one of which addresses the crucial question 'are our coastal waters measurably warmer?'. The other ways of seeing if there are FishSOOP data in your region of interest is via some plots you are already familiar with: look for magenta squares denoting FishSOOP locations in the various SST plots and on the Argo index page. Click on the squares to see the temperature profiles.
What's the latest example of how useful FishSOOP data is? Look no further than last week, when an extraordinary event occurred in the Northern Rivers region of NSW (south of about 28.5ºS). Locals were astonished to see large numbers of sharks and dolphins feasting on 'bait balls' in waters normally full of surfers. Satellite imagery showed where cold water was coming to the surface at the coast (Figure 1), while some FishSOOP data showed that on days around the 7 December (Figure 2) the water was about 3º colder than usual from the surface to at least 18 m. As Colette Kerry explained in the UNSW Substack article: cold water is normally submerged (because it is dense) and is high in nutrient (long story). If something brings it up to the sun-lit waters, the phytoplankton can grow (see the chlorophyll-a image in Figure 3, with high values at the coast). The zooplankton feeds on that, then the small fish come to feast on the zooplankton, which attracts the bigger fish, then the sharks. So what's the 'something' that brought bottom waters to the surface? A combination of a strong East Australian Current, proximity to a cold-core eddy east of the current, and north-easterly winds (which reduce sea level at the coast - see the SWOT image, Figure 3) all contribute.
To finish, an apology: We haven't quite finished getting all the site navigation working the way it soon will. But the holiday season is upon us, so we are announcing the site even though some pages are still just using plain html.
