LiveOcean main logoLiveOcean
Docs

Forecast movies

Full Region Surface Salinity and Drifters
Full Region Bottom Oxygen
Washington Shelf Bottom Oxygen (5 days)
Puget Sound Surface Temperature
Puget Sound Surface Currents

High-Resolution Submodels

Willapa & Grays Surface Ocean Acidification
Willapa & Grays Bottom Ocean Acidification
Willapa & Grays Surface Temperature
Willapa & Grays Surface Salinity
Willapa & Grays Surface Currents
South Puget Sound Surface Temperature
South Puget Sound Surface Salinity

Interactive Tools

Drifters: Puget Sound
Drifters: Willapa & Grays
Drifters: Willapa 2025 Custom
Observation Viewer

Background

How Tides Work in Puget Sound
Observed Long-term Trends in Puget Sound Water Properties
The Estuarine Exchange Flow

About the Model

Data Access
How the Model Works
How We Test the Model
References

Gallery

A Year of Modeled Salinity
A Year of Modeled Oxygen
A Year of Modeled Phytoplankton
    3. Forecast movies
    4. Full Region Surface Salinity and Drifters

Full Region Surface Salinity and Drifters

This is a movie made from the most recent LiveOcean three-day forecast.

The movie has a panel at the bottom that shows time. The tide is evident in the twice-a-day variation of the sea surface height. Daytimes are shown as the thick yellow lines on the horizontal axis. Winds are shown by an arrow in the middle of the map, with the scale given by the circle. The black line off the coast on the map is the 200 m depth line, which marks the "shelf break" separating the coastal region from the deeper ocean beyond.

On this page

Link 1Link 2Link 3

Content

FeedbackEdit page

© 2026 LiveOcean.

Last edited 07/04/2025 14:13:04
  3. Gallery
  5. A Year of Modeled Phytoplankton

A year of Phytoplankton in the Salish Sea and Pacific Northwest Coast

The movie above shows a full year of phytoplankton concentration simulated by the LiveOcean model. The colorscale - blue to red - goes from zero to 25 mg of Chlorophyll per cubic meter. Phytoplankton, the base of the marine food chain, are tiny photosynthetic organisms that drift with the currents. They need two things to grow: nutrients and light. Along the US West Coast nutrients are brought to the surface (where light can penetrate the water) mostly by winds. Winds from the north, which happen primarily in the summer in the Pacific Northwest, push the surface water to the south. The Coriolis force, caused by the Earth's rotation, deflects that water to the right, and hence offshore. In its place water is pulled up from deeper ("upwelling") and brings nutrients with it. In the Pacific Northwest nutrients also are pulled up in canyons and cycled through the estuarine circulation of the Salish Sea, significantly boosting phytoplankton growth above what the winds alone would do. Within Puget Sound you can see that some bays are highly productive, in common with estuaries around the world.

A Year of Modeled Oxygen

Content

FeedbackEdit page