Algae blooms dotted Puget Sound on a recent Department of Ecology surveillance flight from Seattle to Olympia, prompting one scientist to say it's the most intense bloom he's seen in 2.5 years of monitoring.
credit:
Ashley Ahearn
Christopher Krembs, an oceanographer with WA Department of Ecology, photographs algal blooms on a recent flight over Southern Puget Sound.
credit:
Ashley Ahearn
Christopher Krembs goes up in an airplane over Puget Sound once a month and photographs everything from oil sheens to stormwater runoff.
He’s an oceanographer with the Washington Department of Ecology and his work contributes to a project called “Eyes Over Puget Sound”. The program monitors water quality and conditions from the air.
But when he came down from his regular flight this week Krembs said things are looking different out on the water.
“We’ve been doing this for 2.5 years,” Krembs says, “I have not seen a bloom that strong. Definitely this is worth noting.”
Algae populations boom during sunny warm weather. The spring snowmelt funneling out of rivers into Puget Sound also provides a lot of nutrients for the algae and calm winds have made for an ideal growing environment.
Krembs says these appear to be the normal native varieties of Puget Sound, he just hasn’t seem blooms of this intensity before.
“It looked like, imagine this, you have an old coffee cup sitting on your desk with some cream for three days and you look into it. That’s what it looked like.”
Ecology will notify shellfish harvesters and other agencies, including the Department of Health, so they can conduct on-the -ground testing and monitoring of the blooms.
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