A shift to warmer coastal waters signals fishery impacts, possible drought relief.

More than 3,000 skinny sea lion pups have stranded on California beaches this year – apparently starving, according to experts with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, because coastal waters are unusually warm.

Warmer surface waters mean less productivity at the bottom of the food chain, which hits hard at the top, from salmon to seals.

NOAA’s 2015 State of the California Current Report finds warm “blobs” of surface water off Southern California and Alaska have now merged to cover most of the West Coast. Combine that with weak El Niño conditions and a shift in a long-term cycle known as the Pacific Decadal Oscillation, and NOAA scientists suspect the warm, unproductive ocean conditions could linger – bringing with them drops in salmon, anchovy and market squid populations.

NOAA officials describe the conditions as “unprecedented,” the strongest in the historical record. “We are in some ways entering a situation we haven’t seen before,” says Cisco Werner, director of the Southwest Fisheries Science Center.

There are some bright sides. The change to warmer, less productive surface waters along the California Current could be a harbinger of wetter years coming to the drought-stricken state, according to Carol Reeb, a research associate specializing in fisheries management with Stanford University’s Hopkins Marine Station.

“If we are moving out of this cool, dry regime, we could potentially look forward to [the precipitation] we had in the 1990s,” she says. “We should hopefully see more than normal rain.