Highlights Archive

Atmospheric cold pools over the tropical oceans produce large changes in air temperature and wind speed in the planetary boundary layer. But how they affect the larger atmospheric circulation is not clear. Cold pools are pockets of air cooler than...

NOAA and NASA researchers have found that Earth’s energy imbalance approximately doubled during the 14-year period from 2005 to 2019. Earth's climate is determined by a delicate balance between how much of the Sun's radiative energy is absorbed in...

The EcoFOCI spring mooring cruise departed on the NOAA Ship Oscar Dyson on May 1, from Kodiak, AK for an annual survey that was missed in 2020 due to the COVID-19 pandemic. Scientists from NOAA’s PMEL, University of Washington Cooperative Institute...

The U.S. West Coast continental shelf is known to host methane bubble streams, formerly thought to be rare. However, results of a recently published paper indicate that nearly 3,500 methane bubble streams, clustered into more than 1,300 methane...

A new Old Weather project is now available on the Zooniverse citizen-science platform recovering weather data collected by U.S. Navy ships during World War II (1941-1945) that will drive sophisticated computer models used to reconstruct past weather...

The Madden-Julian Oscillation (MJO) is the leading intraseasonal (20–100 days) variability in the tropics. It affects many weather-climate phenomena globally. Tremendous progress has been made in observing, describing, simulating, understanding, and...

The Beaufort Gyre in the western Arctic Ocean is the largest oceanic freshwater reservoir in the Northern Hemisphere. It has increased its freshwater content by 40% over the past two decades. The fate of the excess freshwater and how and where this...

When a saildrone, an uncrewed, instrumented autonomous vehicle, circumnavigated Antarctica during the winter of 2019, it marked a technological triumph over some of the fiercest marine conditions on Earth. Now, analysis of direct measurements...

The Washington/Oregon shelf, embedded in the Northern California Current System, is a productive habitat with important commercial fisheries. One of the most valuable species is Dungeness crab, which resides on the subsurface shelf and is sensitive...

Shelled pteropods, microscopic free-swimming sea snails, are widely regarded as indicators for ocean acidification because research has shown that their fragile shells are vulnerable to increasing ocean acidity. Sometimes called sea butterflies...

Ocean warming absorbs about 9/10th of the excess energy that is entering Earth’s climate system because of a build-up of man-made greenhouse gasses in the atmosphere. That warming causes ocean expansion, contributing to sea level rise. Knowing how...

The magnitude 7.0 Haiti earthquake of 2010 ruptured a complex fault network including both strike-slip faults (where two blocks slide past one another) and reverse faults (in which the upper block, above the fault plane, moves up and over the lower...

NOAA’s 15th Arctic Report Card catalogs for 2020 the numerous ways that climate change continues to disrupt the polar region, with second-highest air temperatures and second-lowest summer sea ice driving a cascade of impacts, including the loss of...

The El Niño Southern Oscillation (ENSO) in the Pacific Ocean has major worldwide social and economic consequences through its global scale effects on atmospheric and oceanic circulation, marine and terrestrial ecosystems, and other natural systems...

From spring to early fall in a typical year, NOAA and research partners conduct several important scientific surveys in the U.S. waters of the Bering and Chukchi Seas. Scientists collect oceanographic and biological data that are used to inform...

After 8 months of sitting on the seafloor, PMEL’s latest engineering development, the Flotation Controllable Ocean Mooring (FCOM) system successfully resurfaced in July. Over the last two years, PMEL has been developing a profiling mooring for use in...