Skillful prediction of tropical Pacific fisheries provided by Atlantic Niños

12 pages, 4 figures.-- Data availability Annual catch data from FAO major fishing areas are available from the Sea Around Us Project (http://www.seaaroundus.org/data/#/fao). Hadley Centre Sea Ice and Sea Surface Temperature data set (HadISST) are available from the Met Office Hadley Centre observations datasets (https://www.metoffice.gov.uk/hadobs/hadisst/). National Centers for Environmental Prediction (NCEP) reanalysis data are available from the NOAA/OAR/ESRL PSL website (https://psl.noaa.gov/). GFDL COBALT and FishMIP simulation data (EcoOcean, BOATS and Macroecological) are accessible through the Potsdam-Institute for Climate Impact Research Earth System Grid Federation (ESGF) data node (https://esg.pik-potsdam.de/search/isimip/). Code availabilityS4CAST originally published MATLAB® code is open access and available from the Zenodo repository (doi:10.5281/zenodo.15985) in the URL https://zenodo.org/record/15985. The rest of MATLAB scripts used in this analysis can be made available upon request from the corresponding author ([email protected]). Updated S4CAST versions can be requested to the TROPA-UCM research group ([email protected])

Tropical Pacific upwelling-dependent ecosystems are the most productive and variable worldwide, mainly due to the influence of El Niño Southern Oscillation (ENSO). ENSO can be forecasted seasons ahead thanks to assorted climate precursors (local-Pacific processes, pantropical interactions). However, owing to observational data scarcity and bias-related issues in earth system models, little is known about the importance of these precursors for marine ecosystem prediction. With recently released reanalysis-nudged global marine ecosystem simulations, these constraints can be sidestepped, allowing full examination of tropical Pacific ecosystem predictability. By complementing historical fishing records with marine ecosystem model data, we show herein that equatorial Atlantic Sea Surface Temperatures (SSTs) constitute a superlative predictability source for tropical Pacific marine yields, which can be forecasted over large-scale areas up to 2 years in advance. A detailed physical-biological mechanism is proposed whereby Atlantic SSTs modulate upwelling of nutrient-rich waters in the tropical Pacific, leading to a bottom-up propagation of the climate-related signal across the marine food web. Our results represent historical and near-future climate conditions and provide a useful springboard for implementing a marine ecosystem prediction system in the tropical Pacific

This research was funded by the EU H2020 project TRIATLAS (no. 817578), the Universidad Complutense de Madrid project FEI-EU-19-09 and the Spanish Ministry of Economy and Competitiveness project PRE4CAST (CGL2017-86415-R).

With the funding support of the ‘Severo Ochoa Centre of Excellence’ accreditation (CEX2019-000928-S), of the Spanish Research Agency (AEI)

Peer reviewed