Director’s Note: Our bay is getting warmer – why should we care?

Over the past few years, we’ve seen some great progress in getting our water quality issues under control. Not that we’re in a pristine condition – an unattainable goal – but we have the best water quality, across the bay, at any time over the past 10 to 15 years. As we pointed out in the last Director’s Note, the amount of algae in the water column (expressed in units of the photosynthetic plant pigment Chlorophyll-a) has shown substantial declines over the past few years. We had upticks in Little Sarasota and Roberts Bays in 2022 associated with impacts from Hurricane Ian, but values then continued their overall decrease, as shown below.