Puget Sound Harbor Safety Committee meeting notes

Feb. 3., 2010, 10-12 a.m., South Federal Building

New container ship terminal in Tacoma (SSA Marine presention)

• Puyallup Tribal Terminal
• 3-4 berths (~850′ spacing, 51′ deep)
• 200 acres
• About the scale of Terminal 18
• Market demand is too low to proceed
• Permits should be in place in ~1 year
• Construction will take at least 2 years
• Port has already constructed one 1200′ berth
• 50-80k cubic yards of soil is contaminated (used to be a Navy Dock; Lincoln ditch)

Puget Sound Tidal Energy (presentation by Craig Collar, Senior Manager; manages renewable energy projects)

• Filed draft license application with FERC about 2 months ago
• 80% comes from Columbia hydropower, Initiative 937 dictates added generation be new renewables
• Only 2 of 7 initial sites are still of interest (dropped Speiden recently)
• Focused mostly on Admiralty Inlet as pilot plant
• Open Hydro turbine was developed in U.S. but is licensed by an Irish company
• Nova Scotia Power just deployed second largest Open Hydro device in Bay of Fundy (largest is in Ireland)
• Deployed at Falls of Inverness in Ireland (tug/barge held station in 10 knot currents)
• Site is ~1/2 mile outside shipping station
• At ~60m, this will be deepest deployment to date, globally.
• FERC 10 year license should allow us to run/maintain 2 turbines for a test period of 3-5 years, allowing reasonable amount of time for installation and removal.  We need data on how much maintenance is needed.  We could re-license again as a pilot, or shift to a commercial permit and more turbines in a second phase (~5-10 turbines in second phase)?
• Polyage studies indicate you’ll have to put order 100s of turbines into Admiralty inlet to appreciable affect the tidal exchange within Puget Sound.
• We need about 140MW, about half of that has already been provided by wind.  (1MW powers about 700 homes)

Other business

• Most other Harbor Safety Committees are funded by Coast Guard or State sources (e.g. CA)
• New article on “Industry Standards of Care” in U.S. Coast Guard quarterly publication Proceedings.
• Links to all U.S. Harbor Safety Committees are now on the Oil Spill Task Force web site.
• Upcoming meetings in Long Beach, Portland…

Vessel Traffic Safety related to the BP pier expansion

• Vessel Traffic Safety Risk Analysis model was developed and reported on by George Washington University (BP paid ~$1M for it, then asked for further analysis related to some U.S. Army Corp questions).
• EIS draft may be available later this year (Olivia Romano, BP is supportive of a presentation to the Committee by someone from George Washington U team that developed basic model)
• The data are all public, but the model is proprietary.

Dr. Jack Rensel, Rensel Associates Aquatic Sciences (works with Puget Sound fish farmers on permitting/etc., but not BC farmers)

Harmful Algal Blooms and Possible Effects on Fraser River Sockeye Salmon

11:04 Intro

Much of this talk is based on co-author Nicola Haigh’s 10-year sockeye database.

Target algae of interest: Heterosigma akashiwo, HAMP database

11:06 Background

Heterosigma is a microflagellate that kills farmed fish in Puget Sound, BC, and beyond (but not Korea).   Associated with eutrophication and sometimes kills plankton.  Migrates vertically up to 15m depth, cysts in silty sediments, sometimes blooms over entire basins for long periods (>1 week).

11:12 Initiation of blooms

Initiation often in S Straits of Georgia (and sometimes Bellingham Bay, or Case Inlet).  There are U.S. fish farms nearby in the San Juan area and near Vancouver.  Association with neap tides and southward pulsing dynamics in Straits of Georgia and Haro Strait.

11:17 Wild fish exposure

Some think wild fish will escape by swimming under when cells raft on surface, but cells can be mixed down and continue to be toxic to fish.  Sockeye are surface oriented, both as adults and as juveniles (near-shore).  Since farmed fish in 15m deep pens are dying, it is likely that wild sockeye are at risk, too.

11:19 Fraser River sockeye

Most important stock on the west coast (CA-BC).  They have 4-year predominant life cycle with juveniles readring 1 winter in lake prior to out-migration followed by 2 winters at sea.  Most smolts leave Fraser in May/June; adults return July and August.  Most juveniles migrate out northward, but some go south.  All stick close to coast and many go through the Gulf Islands (Groot and Cooke, 1987; map indicates minimal use of the San Juans).

August 2009 news: deep crash of Fraser River sockeye.  Why?  Total run peaked at ~24M in 1994; ~2M in 2007.  From Pacific Salmon Commission escapement data (1952-2007).

11:25 Harmful Algae Monitoring Program (HAMP) database

Sampling areas on outer and inner Vancouver Island.  Frequent occurrence of blooms in BC, while we go years without blooms in Puget Sound.  2007 saw a huge increase in blooms relative to previous decade.

11:29 Looking for correlations

Comparing time series of marine survival fraction (e.g. from Chilco stock total run size) and bloom index (e.g. S. Georgia Strait sampling area) the smoking gun is Chilco stock inversely correlated with bloom index in S Georgia Strait, and to a lesser extnt in Queen Charlottes and Broughton Archipelago.

What about Puget Sound?  Looking at years in which we had large blooms in both PS and BC, followed two years later by low run sizes.  A mystery is that there are no PS reports of major fish kills during large bloom periods (though at least some dead wild salmonids have been reported in every major bloom reported).

Prior to 1980, most adult sockeye came in through Straits of Juan de Fuca.  Northerly diversion rate has increased since (from ~20% coming in through Johnstone Strait to ~70%).

David Welch did a nice study of tagged smolts, but had to raise to bigger size and they swam through bloom areas in just a few days.  Wild smolts likely hang out longer in shallow, near-shore areas, increasing their exposure risk.

11:42 What is changing?

Masson and Cummins, 2007 show that Strait of Georgia is warming (~2C since 1970) throughout water column.

Warmer springs => earlier blooms => into juvenile sockeye timing

Nitrogen loading from human society increasing; Newton and Van Voorhis, 2003, shows that Possession Sound and Admiralty Inlet are nutrient sensitive.  Human population around Salish Sea is near 4M now, there are many combined sewer overflows (especially around very dense Vancouver), and Victoria won’t treat fully until 2020.

11:47 Monitoring and mitigation

Need ORCA buoys around Puget Sound

Clay is effective in Korea for flocculation; maybe could help in combination with the Solarbee circulators being used in East Coast estuaries.

Chilco stock should be tagged somehow.

Make better use of satellite data, e.g. NOAA CoastWatch Aqua MODIS

11:48 GIS demo shows how satellite data can contextualize tracks of fish migration.

11:55 Alternative hypotheses

Food web problems?

Sea lice (not a problem in PS due to lower salinity).  Contested, but HABs may pre-dispose smolts to sea lice infection.

11;57 Conclusion

HABS are unlikely to be sole cause of long term decline of sockeye recruit per spawner, but may be a major component of smolt loss, especially in 2006 and 2007.

Long term R/S decline since 1989 points to ecosystem oscillation or change.

12:00 Thanks

Mike LaPointe acknowledged for data from Pacific Salmon Commission.

Neptune hydrophone map

On December 8th the NEPTUNE Canada cabled ocean observing system started pouring data on to the Internet.  This opens the door for John Ford and his collaborators to listen for killer whales on the outer coast of southwest Vancouver Island.  The Naxys hydrophone is sensitive to 5Hz-65kHz and is located in Folger Passage at 95m depth (see map at right) just outside Barkley Sound near Bamfield, Canada.

It’s unclear whether or not the audio stream will make it to land in real-time.  There is a comment on the web site that suggests that the hydrophone was to go live on December 8th, but I could find no live or archived data.  The following quote from the associated Coastal Marine Ecosystem project page suggests the signals may initially go only as far as Bamfield Marine Station where vessels might be able to respond to acquire photos for species identification:

“The underwater acoustic signal from the Folger Passage Node will be streamed live to the Bamfield Marine Sciences Centre and hopefully the internet so that students and marine mammal researchers will be able to listen for their species of interest. The archived broadband acoustic signal will also be freely available for more advanced analyses.”

Hydrophones of the VENUS array (Strait of Georgia, east node; 4Hz-100 kHz. ) provided near real-time data for 6 weeks in early 2009, failed, and were replaced on 9/27/09. You can again view spectrograms and listen to mp3 files (lagged ~10 minutes) at this hard-to-find page — in this example from hydrophone 2 at 170m depth — but no archives beyond 1 hour are available on-line (even after registering for data downloads).

[Update 12/17: the fall-winter 2010 VENUS newsletter states that they are providing data from multiple hydrophones that they are comparing.  “Working to improve the VENUS hydrophone system, our team re-configured the 170m-deep array in the Strait of Georgia. We deployed one of our original hydrophones, the Burns CR100, alongside two new ones — a High Tech HTI-99-HF and a Reson 4032T. We are testing the performance of these hydrophones to assess their long-term stability and acoustic character (sensitivity and response). Each hydrophone has its own web page with audio and spectrograms updated every 5 minutes. Already, we have detected hundreds of ships and ferries, and environmental noise associated with wind, rain and even thunder. Check out near real time audio at www.venus.uvic.ca.” Here are direct links to the data archives 3 types of hydrophones: #1: HTI | #2: Burns | #3: Reson.]

[Update 10/12/2010: It appears that the Burns and Reson are still working nicely, while the HTI is functional but generating a signal with interference when the Burns has it’s automatic gain on (noted on June 10, 2010). Also, there is a link to a multimedia archive (download requires registration), but the temporal coverage is very sporadic and generally out-dated.]

[Update 10/03/2011: VENUS has a new hydrophone player that’s pretty cool, but it’s really annoying how their links keep breaking and it’s unclear how often they really have near-real-time data available.  Today I checked again because the southern residents may have gone north last night, but the “most recent” data was from a couple days ago — 10/1/11.  Here’s a bit of info about the hydrophone data processing.]

There is appears to be some history of security concerns voiced by the U.S. and Canadian Navies.  For example, in a November, 2005 IEEE post about Neptune, author Peter Fairley reported:

In the category of unintended consequences are tensions between NEPTUNE and VENUS management and the Canadian and U.S. navies. What concerns the militaries is the possibility that their foes will employ publicly available data from the systems’ sophisticated hydrophones to identify vessels and track their comings and goings. (Canada’s entire Pacific fleet docks at Vancouver Island, just west of Victoria, while a group of U.S. nuclear submarines calls nearby Puget Sound, Wash., home.)

The VENUS organizers granted the Canadian military the power to squelch VENUS’s acoustic data whenever the navy deems national security to be at risk. That worries some NEPTUNE researchers. “For observatories expecting to have a 24/7 feed, that could be very disruptive to the science,” says Benoît Pirenne, the assistant director of information technology for NEPTUNE Canada, who is designing NEPTUNE’s data and control system.

Such concerns are also alluded to in one slide of a PDF presentation by Svein Vagel (S8_S10_Vagle).  He suggests that the concerns were met by giving the Navy an on/off switch and storing no data locally (presumably because someone might use a sub or dredge to steal the instruments from 170 or 270m depths).  [Update 12/17: see first comment from Dwight Evans, content manager for NEPTUNE Canada web site, confirming that the Navies are filtering the hydrophone signals.]

Other NEPTUNE Canada nodes also have hydrophones.  Pictured at left is the arm of the Canadian remotely operated vehicle ROPOS holding a Naxys hydrophone on a stand that was deployed 10m from the Barkley Head instrument platform (in background).  A instrument spreadsheet indicates another hydrophone was placed 14m from the Barkely Canyon axis node.  These nodes are located on the outer shelf at the latitude of Cape Flattery, so could provide a nice complement to the Neah Bay hydrophone as we try to understand when/how the southern residents leave the Strait of Juan de Fuca and head south down the WA coast.

Locations of hydrophones (m depth, lat, lon):

• Folger Deep Hydrophone 100 48.8139 -125.2809
• Barkley Upper Slope Hydrophone 397 48.4275 -126.1747
• Barkley Axis Hydrophone 982 48.3166 -126.0503

View Salish Sea hydrophone network in a larger map

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