Many Bering Sea fish populations, including the commercially valuable Alaska pollock, thrive best when bottom waters remain cold throughout the summer. Located in the southeastern Bering Sea, NOAA's M2 moored buoy—nicknamed "Peggy"—records water temperatures and other physical and biological data from the surface to the floor of the coastal shelf, giving scientists an important glimpse into the status of the Bering Sea's summer cold pool. This graph shows Peggy's observations of water temperatures near the sea floor (depths of 60 meters, or 197 feet) from 2010 to mid-May 2021. In the early part of the 2010 decade, sub-zero winter temperatures and cooler summers were common. Recent years have been much warmer. NOAA Climate.gov image, based on NOAA buoy data from Shaun Bell. Background image from NOAA/NASA Suomi NPP satellite on February 27, 2021, via Worldview.