In the eastern North Pacific Ocean, Pacific salmon are generally found in the Subarctic region of the Gulf of

• Main Author: Strait Of Georgia
• Other Authors: The Pennsylvania State University CiteSeerX Archives
• Format: Text
• Language: English
• Subjects: Fraser River; Gulf of Alaska; Pacific; Sockeye; Subarctic; Alaska
• Online Access: http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/summary?doi=10.1.1.296.6573; http://www.pices.int/publications/scientific_reports/Report41/Rep41-6-OceanographyAndClimate.pdf

and Margolis, 1991). While southern California is not normally considered Subarctic, it has a cool and productive coastal oceanic habitat because of summer upwelling winds. They create an oceanic habitat that makes it possible for the range of Pacific salmon to extend southward to latitudes they might not otherwise reach. The active upwelling zone is a relatively narrow band of water 10–25 km wide along the North American coast (Huyer, 1983), implying that unsuitable oceanic water is nearby and kept at bay by suitable winds. Their failure can have rather devastating effects. The widespread mortality of juvenile Pacific salmon in 2005 was attributed to the extremely delayed seasonal upwelling winds that year. For many populations of salmon that went to sea in 2005, from Vancouver Island southward, it was the worst survival on record. The low returns of maturing Fraser River sockeye salmon in 2007 were a result of the lowest recorded survival for this river. The remainder of this section considers sequentially, the oceanic environment along the migration route from the Strait of Georgia to the open Gulf of Alaska, with special attention given to the state of the environment while the 2007 ocean entry year of Fraser River sockeye salmon was at sea.