Why we need weather forecast analogues for marine ecosystems

Marine ecosystems face many consequential pressures. Yet, we lack an integrative and predictive capacity to understand how marine ecosystems will respond to the cumulative impacts of these pressures, including climate change. It is not enough to detect responses after the fact; it has become imperative to know in advance where major biological resources or hazards will occur, when they will peak, and how that will impact economic performance. Although forecasts exist for some components of marine ecosystems, these are disparate and suffer from a lack of coordination. There is a need for coordinated, cross-ecosystem scale, integrated, marine ecosystem predictions and synthesis products. The value proposition relative to the blue economy is quite high, positively influencing billions if not trillions of marine sector dollars.