Squid migration and water temperatures

[greg ct]

I'm only looking at the sst to look for warm current coming in.  I've read a few papers on squid migration and it is more than just the temps near shore.  Clouds have been making it difficult to get a single image on it but if you look at the composites, you see the trends.  What I am looking for is where I'll likely focus.  Nantucket Sound is warmer but there is more indication of warmer water coming up to Newport.  I want to see if this correlates to the arrival reports this year.  Simply something to do while we wait.

 

I get it.  I eat, live, and (hopefully not) die by charts when offshore fishing.  I just don't look at them this early.

 

You have to be careful with them at any time though.  All of the free services, and most of the pay services, use composite images.  You know that because every shot they post is a full and complete image with no cloud cover.

 

Basically, what happens is cloud cover, fog, or other forms of moisture (ice crystals high in atmosphere for exaample) will cause large portions of a sat pass image to be unusable.  So sst services will stitch together the data they get from multiple passes over several days to try to fill out the territory, then they use some fancy modeling to fill in the gaps.  

 

The result is images with little or no relation to reality.  And remember, if they are off only 20 miles, you can completely miss a break offshore.  Worse yet if you are chasing one that doesn't exist.

 

But there are sites that offer raw images.  If there is cloud cover, the image is grey in that area.  Then there are images which don't rely on clear skys that cn help you.  Sub surface temp charts are very good at that.  Add those to chlorophyl, mixed layer depth, and others, and you can see through the clouds.

 

But it's a lot of work.  Required when you are the only boat in 40 miles, but not so much for squid.  Here, you can just listen to your network and find when they are in.  Predictions are good, but reality rocks. 

 

But it's all academic until my boat goes in and I get it debugged.    I'm at least a month late this year, and there are only a handful of boats that made it in ahead of me.