OCEANOGRAPHY 201 



These modem fishermen must be businessmen as well as seamen and to run 

 their business their capital equipment must be harvesting fish every day. It 

 cannot lay in harbor for weeks waiting for the weather to moderate; it can- 

 not wait in the bay for the run of fish to come to it ; it cannot scout the far 

 reaches of the o^^ean for days or weeks looking for concentrations of fish. The 

 skipper must know the place to which to run where he can load up his vessel 

 the quickest, get back to port fastest, and repeat the process again with assur- 

 ance. His cost per day goes on whether he is catching fish or not : these are so 

 high that he must keep catcliing. 



Fisli are not spread evenly over the ocean. They concentrate in certain places 

 at certain times, whether for food, to propagate, or to migrate between spawn- 

 ing and feeding places (which may be some hundred or thousands of miles 

 apart). By and large these congregations, both as to place and time, are gov- 

 erned by the changing internal climate of the ocean and this in turn is related 

 to the changing climate of the atmosphere above it. 



If you would put the corn farmer of Iowa in the same ijlace as the tuna 

 fisherman of San Diego, his corn crop would ripen at one time in Alberta, at 

 another time in Louisiana and at quite another time in northern Brazil. The 

 appearance of the com crop in these places would not only rot-ate am<jng them 

 .seasonally but change from year to year in unfathomed ways. We have had the 

 experience of having ,$10 million worth of tuna vessels churning the seas ofC 

 I'eru for a month fruitlessly awaiting the expected tuna crop that, it turned out, 

 was showing up a thousand miles to the north. 



Prior to the war we had a most generalized picture of the Pacific Ocean's cir- 

 culation which was not much changed from that developed in the sailing boat 

 days of the last century. There was a big clockwise movement of water in the 

 North Pacific, an equally (and opposed) counterclockwise current in the South 

 Pacific, both of which flowed easterly in the upper temperate zone, and westerly 

 in the lower tropical zone. In between them, above the equator was a strong 

 easterly flowing, narrower eciuatorial current. 



Through the Ofiiee of Naval Research the Navy expanded its ocean research 

 activities sharply in the itostwar period, utilizing for this purpose in our area 

 the Scripps Institution of Oceanography of the University of California (and 

 latterly other organizations). We tuna people got on the bandwagon in and 

 about 1950 by seeking the establishment of the Pacific Ocean fishery investiga- 

 tions of the Bureau of Commercial Fisheries centered on Honolulu, and the 

 Inter American Tropical Tuna Commi-ssion centered on the eastern tropical and 

 subtropical Pacific. Just previous to this we Califoruians had got established 

 the California cooperative oceanic fisheries investigations centered on the sar- 

 dine fishery of our temperate water latitudes ; and a little later the salmop 

 people instigated large ocean research activities in the North Pacific centered 

 on the Asiatic and North American salmon runs. 



By 1953 already we had a very unusual year in our tuna fishery off Peru and 

 Ecuador. In that area of the world this condition occurred with enough regu- 

 larity that it had been given a name. It was an "El Nino" year. But at the 

 same time the POFI research boats working south across the equator found that 

 the normally strong equatorial current had almost stoppefl flowing. Off Cali- 

 fornia there was unusually dry weather, the ocean had warmed, and sardine 

 production had gone from bad to worse. The year class of salmon that went to 

 sea that year did not return to these northern streams 3 years later in the abun- 

 dance that was expected from past history. The rather newly discovered jet 

 stream of the high atmosphere layers, that Pan-American Airways was trying 

 to learn to ride from Tokyo to Honolulu, disappeared for awhile. 



From this assorted information the su.spicion existed that the variations in 

 ocean climate and circulation of the whole North Pacific and adjacent South 

 Pacific were different aspects of one interdigitating whole and that all of the 

 fisheries of the eastern Pacific were affected simultaneously by these changes. 

 To investigate these things the Bureau of Commercial Fisheries established its 

 Stanford Laboratory under Dr. Sette, who had been Chief at POFI in Honolulu. 



Dr. Sette had only two sets of oceanwide data with which to work. These 

 were the sea-surface temperatures and barometric pressures which cooperative 

 ships at sea had been furnishing the Weather Bureau over the years. While the 

 data were only of two sorts their quantity was staggering. The first shipment 

 from the Weather Bureau consisted of 5 million separate observations. This 

 has been followed by other shipments of a million or so observations. The task 

 of making anything out of this welter of data 10 years ago would have been 

 superhuman. Even today with the so-called electronic "brains" the ta.sk of 



