CANSO — Record-breaking warm temperatures were captured in the annual Atlantic Ocean monitoring program in the spring of 2022. This spring, Department of Fisheries and Oceans (DFO) scientist Chantelle Layton, who is part of the DFO team analyzing last year’s data, found record high temperatures across the survey area on the Scotian Shelf – the section of the Continental Shelf off Nova Scotia – excluding the eastern Scotia Shelf, where DFO didn’t conduct an ecosystem survey last year.
Along with high temperatures, Layton told The Journal the data failed to find the typically present cold intermediate layer in waters off the western Scotia Shelf. She said, “We define that as water that is four degrees or colder and the survey that we use to calculate this is the ecosystem survey that occurs in July. That’s a good time to get a pulse on what that cold intermediate layer is like mostly because it is water from the winter that is at a deeper level.”
Layton explained the failure to find the cold intermediate layer could be attributed to two factors. Firstly, waters on the western Scotian Shelf were warmer and, “for the eastern Scotian Shelf, we didn’t get a chance to sample in that area and that’s usually where we find the colder waters.”
To read the rest of the story, please go to: Local Journalism Initiative
