Climatic Control of Upwelling Variability along the Western North-American Coast

The high biological production of the California Current System (CCS) results from the seasonal development of equatorward alongshore winds that drive coastal upwelling. While several climatic fluctuation patterns influence the dynamics and biological productivity of the CCS, including the El Nino-Southern Oscillation (ENSO), the Pacific Decadal Oscillation index (PDO) and the North Pacific Gyre Oscillation (NPGO), the mechanisms of interaction between climatic oscillations and the CCS upwelling dynamics have remained obscure. Here, we use Singular Spectral Analysis (SSA) to reveal, for the first time, low-frequency concordance between the time series of climatic indices and upwelling intensity along the coast of western North America. Based on energy distributions in annual, semiannual and low-frequency signals, we can divide the coast into three distinct regions. While the annual upwelling signal dominates the energy spectrum elsewhere, low-frequency variability is maximal in the regions south of 33 degrees N. Non-structured variability associated with storms and turbulent mixing is enhanced at northerly locations. We found that the low-frequency signal is significantly correlated with different climatic indices such as PDO, NPGO and ENSO with the correlation patterns being latitude-dependent. We also analyzed the correlations between this upwelling variability and sea surface temperature (SST) and sea level pressure (SLP) throughout the North Pacific to visualize and interpret the large-scale teleconnection dynamics in the atmosphere that drive the low-frequency coastal winds. These results provide new insights into the underlying mechanisms connecting climatic patterns with upwelling dynamics, which could enhance our prediction and forecast capabilities of the effects of future oceanographic and climatic variability in the CCS.