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The El Niño Southern Oscillation is one of the most intensively studied climate drivers on the planet. During the warm El Niño phase, vast volumes of warm water release heat previously trapped in the deep ocean, altering weather patterns around the...
On July 20, 2026, researchers embarked on the NOAA Ocean Acidification Program's West Coast Ocean Acidification mission (WCOA 2026). Departing from San Diego aboard the University of Alaska, Fairbanks (R/V) Sikuliaq, the team will travel north to...
El Niño and La Niña phases in the tropical Pacific Ocean are the major drivers of interannual variability in the region. This includes the oxygen (O2) content of upper ocean waters, with El Niño resulting in higher O2 in the eastern tropical Pacific...
Increased monitoring efficiency is required to address the growing risk of harmful algal blooms and rapid shifts in coastal ecosystems across the Pacific Arctic and Pacific Northwest. Traditional research approaches, such as ship...
A new paper by Usui et al. published in Journal of Physical Oceanography develops an analytical equation for vertical motion associated with mesoscale eddies subject to wind forcing. Mesoscale eddies, the "weather" of the ocean, are characterized by...
In May 2026, three members of PMEL's Engineering team (Scott Stalin, Nick Delich, and Courtney Avioli) were aboard 404 Marine's Michael UHL. Their destination? The Harvest platform—a retired oil and gas rig ~10 miles off the California coast near...
New report released by NOAA Northwest Fisheries Science Center and PMEL
Since the 1970s, researchers have used passive acoustic approaches to document the presence of locally occurring killer whales in the Salish Sea ecosystem, including endangered...
Imagine being able to identify every fish, mammal, invertebrate, and microbe in a patch of the ocean just by sampling a single cup of water. Environmental DNA (eDNA) metabarcoding is a process that allows scientists to detect the genetic fingerprint...
NOAA/Pacific Marine Environmental Laboratory (PMEL)-coauthored research article wins United Kingdom's National Champion award and is shortlisted for the Frontiers Planet Prize.
Ocean Acidification: Another Planetary Boundary Crossed, published in Glob...
California's 2026 Coast and Ocean Assessment was released in March by the California Ocean Protection Council (OPC), in partnership with the California Ocean Science Trust. This coast and ocean assessment is the result of the work of more than 120...
PMEL's Atmospheric Chemistry Group (ACG) and U.S. Department of Energy's Pacific Northwest National Laboratory (PNNL) are working together to deploy the first of an autonomous system to observe atmospheric, cloud, and aerosol properties on a...
The global ocean has long been recognized as a key regulator of Earth’s changing climate, absorbing about 25% of the human-produced carbon dioxide gas (CO2) released to the atmosphere each year. To monitor this oceanic "sink" for human-produced CO2...
On March 11, 2011, a magnitude 9.1 megathrust earthquake struck off the coast of Japan. Violent tremors lasted for about six...
Recently retired NOAA Pacific Marine Environmental Laboratory (PMEL) senior scientist Dr. Richard Feely was featured on a podcast called Ecoshock hosted by Alex Smith. The podcast addresses earth science issues like climate change and ocean...
Carefully enhanced wastewater could one day benefit coastal marine resources
The continual rise of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere isn't just changing weather patterns, it's also silently altering the chemistry of the global ocean. As CO2 dissolves...
As the 2025 hurricane season ramps up, NOAA will be testing small, uncrewed instrumented sailboats built by a robotics company to capture weather and ocean data in the path of tropical storms. The observations from these robots will help scientists...
