TY - JOUR T1 - Skillful prediction of tropical Pacific fisheries provided by Atlantic Niños JF - bioRxiv DO - 10.1101/2021.02.17.431587 SP - 2021.02.17.431587 AU - Iñigo Gómara AU - Belén Rodríguez-Fonseca AU - Elsa Mohino AU - Teresa Losada AU - Irene Polo AU - Marta Coll Y1 - 2021/01/01 UR - http://biorxiv.org/content/early/2021/02/18/2021.02.17.431587.abstract N2 - Tropical Pacific upwelling-dependent ecosystems are the most productive and variable worldwide, mainly due to the influence of El Niño Southern Oscillation (ENSO). ENSO can be forecasted seasons ahead thanks to assorted climate precursors (local-Pacific processes, pantropical interactions). However, owing to observational data scarcity and bias-related issues in earth system models, little is known about the importance of these precursors for marine ecosystem prediction. With recently released reanalysis-nudged global marine ecosystem simulations, these constraints can be sidestepped, allowing full examination of tropical Pacific ecosystem predictability. By complementing historical fishing records with marine ecosystem model data, we show herein that equatorial Atlantic Sea Surface Temperatures (SSTs) constitute a superlative predictability source for tropical Pacific marine yields, which can be forecasted over large-scale areas up to 2 years in advance. A detailed physical-biological mechanism is proposed whereby Atlantic SSTs modulate upwelling of nutrient-rich waters in the tropical Pacific, leading to a bottom-up propagation of the climate-related signal across the marine food web. Our results represent historical and near-future climate conditions and provide a useful springboard for implementing a marine ecosystem prediction system in the tropical Pacific.Competing Interest StatementThe authors have declared no competing interest. ER -