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Photo by: Isobel Pearsall
Sea Surface Temperature
Long-term trends show that the sea surface temperature and salinity observations taken at a
temperatures have been increasing globally number of shore stations throughout BC: most
(IPCC 2019) and the same is true along the BC of these are lighthouses, and the data have been
coast (Amos et al . 2015; DFO 2019) and it is collected since 1914 for some stations! These data
projected to continue (Greenan et al . 2019) . The show a linear and increasing trend in sea surface
Institute of Ocean Sciences in Sidney BC maintains temperatures throughout BC ocean waters over
a long-term data set of both daily sea surface the last 85 years (DFO 2019) (Figure 6 .2) .
Figure 6.2 – Trend in annual sea surface temperature based on the observations of all lighthouses from the
British Columbia Lightstation Network Dataset. representing inner and outer coast stations. The bars represent anom-
alies, averaged across all monitoring locations, from the long-term average temperature (1935-2020). Blue bars
indicate below average temperatures for that year and red above average. Error bars indicate the variability between
lighthouse data for each year. Figure, used with permission, appears in the State of Pacific Ocean Report (DFO).
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