Introduction

In 1982 and 1983 an intense El Niño in the central and eastern equatorial Pacific Ocean spread warm water far northward along the west coast of North America. This event is believed to have been an important factor contributing to poor salmon harvests along the California, Oregon, and Washington coasts during the 1983 and 1984 seasons and has been largely blamed for the socioeconomic distress experienced by commercial salmon trailers during those seasons. At the time, newspaper headlines that appeared in the US Pacific Northwest followed the lead of distressed commercial harvesters and disappointed sports fishers in proclaiming the El Niño to be a natural disaster with significant impacts on the salmon fishery. To what extent was El Niño responsible for the poor runs of coho and chinook salmon along the US west coast in 1983 and 1984? How large were the actual socioeconomic impacts? To what extent was the reported socioeconomic distress among commercial harvesters a direct result of this event? These questions are complex, and no simple answers can be given. Nevertheless, an examination of the experience of the Pacific Northwest salmon fishery during this El Niño event can further our understanding of the interactions between climate, biological processes, and the human activities dependent on those processes.

The purpose of this study is to gain insight into the impacts of climatic variability on a complex fishery system and, by analogy, the potential impacts on fisheries of climate change.