Highlights Archive

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

Surprising findings from a pair of NOAA buoys show the importance of frequent, long-term observations

While the global ocean has long been recognized as a crucial carbon sink, quantifying the exchange of carbon dioxide (CO₂) between the ocean and...

The global ocean covers 71% of the planet. Across these vast spaces, interactions between the ocean and atmosphere are primary drivers of Earth's weather, climate and marine productivity.

Satellites, instrumented moorings, and infrequent ship-borne...

Rare observations of surface currents to the left of winds in the Bay of Bengal

One of the foundational principles of modern oceanography is that ocean surface currents on our rotating planet will be deflected to the right of the winds in the...

Humans generate about 36 billion tons of carbon dioxide pollution every year, about 30 percent of which are absorbed by the oceans. While that means there's less carbon dioxide (CO₂) heating the atmosphere, the result is that the chemistry of the...

Unprecedentedly low sea ice cover in the northern Bering and Chukchi seas during back-to-back winters from 2018 to 2019 caused a cascade of impacts that abruptly transformed the regional marine ecosystem, compounding challenges faced by the...

Over the past 20 years, researchers have been studying how the atmosphere reacts to changing ocean temperatures globally, sparking debates on the exact mechanisms at play.

Using advanced tools like uncrewed surface vehicles (USVs), moored ocean...

Fifty years ago, NOAA created a new environmental research laboratory in Seattle with an initial focus on water quality in Puget Sound, and environmental studies of the Gulf of Alaska and Bering Sea.

Since then, the Pacific Marine Environmental...

The year 2022 was marked by unusual (though not unprecedented) disruptions in the climate system including a “triple-dip” La Niña nearly continuous from August 2020 through the end of 2022, extraordinary amount of precipitation over Antarctica in...

Greenhouse gas concentrations, global sea levels and ocean heat content reached record highs in 2021, according to the 32nd annual State of the Climate report, despite a double-dip La Niña event taking place in the Pacific Ocean.

Ocean climate...