Climate Drivers of Alaska Summer Stream Temperature

The temperature of the water in lakes, rivers and streams has wide ranging impacts from local water quality and fish habitats to global climate change. Salmon fisheries in Alaska, a critical source of food in many subsistence communities, are sensitive to large-scale climate variability and river and stream temperatures have also been linked with salmon production in Alaska. Given current and projected climate change, understanding the mechanisms that link the large-scale climate and river and stream temperatures is essential to better understand the changes that may occur with aquatic life in Alaska's waterways on which subsistence users depend. An analysis of Alaska stream temperatures in the context of reanalysis, downscaled, station and other climate data is undertaken in this study to fill that need. Preliminary analysis identified eight stream observation sites with sufficiently long (>15 years) data available for climate-scale analysis in Alaska with one station, Terror Creek in Kodiak, having a 30-year record. Cross-correlation of summer (June-August) water temperatures between the stations are generally high even though they are spread over a large geographic region. Correlation analysis of the Terror Creek summer observations with seasonal sea surface temperatures (SSTs) in the North Pacific broadly resembles the SST anomaly fields typically associated with the Pacific Decadal Oscillation (PDO). A similar result was found for the remaining stations and in both cases PDO-like correlation patterns also occurred in the preceding spring. These preliminary results demonstrate that there is potential to diagnose the mechanisms that link the large-scale climate system and Alaska stream temperatures.