What's New Archive
To better understand the effects of the ocean on global climate and weather, scientists from PMEL deployed an Ocean Climate Station mooring on the edge of the warm Agulhas Return Current (ARC) southeast of South Africa. This mooring will provide critical data on how this powerful current warms the atmosphere and how it affects the local metrology and climate.
The ARC mooring is part the PMEL Ocean Climate Station program, a contribution to the global network of time series reference sites.
Dr. Richard Feely, a senior scientist at PMEL, will be honored with the Heinz Environmental Award at a ceremony in Washington D.C. on November 15. The 16th Heinz awards focused on Global Change, and Dr. Feely is credited with playing a leading role in examining the acidification of oceans and shifting public policy to address this growing issue.
Please join PMEL is congratulating Dr. Feely on this well deserved honor. You can find out more about the important work Dr. Feely and the carbon group are doing on the Ocean Acidification web site.
Released October 21: The 2010 Arctic Report Card highlights record temperatures across Canadian Arctic and Greenland, a reduced summer sea ice cover; record snow cover decreases and links to some Northern Hemisphere weather to support the conclusion that a return to previous Arctic conditions is unlikely.
PMEL scientist Dr. James Overland, co-editor of the Arctic Report Card, describes how the Arctic climate is impacting mid-latitude weather, as seen in Winter 2009-2010, in the Atmosphere section of the report.
Please visit the 2010 Arctic Report Card web site for the full report.
In a special issue of Oceanography out now, the Intergovernmental Oceanographic Commission (IOC) celebrates 50 years of outstanding service to the community through international cooperation and coordination of ocean research. PMEL’s Dr. Michael McPhaden discusses the success of the Tropical Ocean Global Atmosphere (TOGA) program and Dr. Chris Sabine discusses International Carbon Coordination and Roger Revelle’s legacy in the IOC.
To read these articles and more, see the Oceanography web site.
Released September 20: Scientists at the University of Washington and PMEL analyzing measurements taken in the deep ocean around the globe published their results in the Journal of Climate. They find a warming trend that contributes to sea level rise, especially around Antarctica. Previous studies have shown that the upper ocean is warming, but this study determines how much additional heat the deep ocean is storing from warming observed all the way to the ocean floor.
The high-quality data used in this study were taken during PMEL Repeat Hydrography and other cruises occupied from 1980 through 2010.
EcoFOCI is heading far north to the Chukchi Sea (August 16-September 20) to deploy moorings that will over-winter under the ice to monitor ecosystem changes for the first time in the region. At three different sites in the Chukchi Sea, EcoFOCI will deploy subsurface moorings that will measure ice thickness, currents, zooplankton, light, nitrate and other important indicators of ecosystem health.
EcoFOCI has an interest in obtaining ice-thickness measurements that will improve the understanding of ice cover, including its thickness, persistence and transport.
In an article recently published in Geophysical Research Letters, Tong Lee of the Jet Propulsion Lab in Pasedena and Mike McPhaden of PMEL analyzed 30 years of NOAA satellite sea surface temperature data and found that the intensity of El Niño events in the central equatorial Pacific has almost doubled in the past three decades, with the strongest warming in 2009-10.
These “central Pacific” (CP) El Niño’s exhibit maximum warming in the central equatorial Pacific in contrast to the classical El Niños, which have maximum warming in the eastern equatorial Pacific.
PMEL senior scientist, Dr. Mike McPhaden is presiding over his first American Geophysical Union (AGU) meeting as AGU President. 2010 The Meeting of the Americas is being held in Iguassu Falls, Brazil during the week of August 9. Dr. McPhaden will lead a Town Hall meeting on "Communicating the Science of Climate Change".
Dr. McPhaden was elected President-elect of the AGU in 2008 and took over as President for a 2-year term beginning in 2010. He is the director of the Tropical Atmosphere Ocean project at PMEL.
In an effort to promote the public’s understanding of atmospheric carbon dioxide (CO2) in an urban setting, scientists from PMEL's Carbon Group partnered with the Pacific Science Center (PSC) and Seattle’s Space Needle to install an atmospheric CO2 sensor on top of the Space Needle. Measurements are made every 5 minutes and streams the information to PMEL where the data are processed in real time, posted to the web and sent to a monitoring station at the PSC.
The web site and PSC display allow the public to examine the latest data showing the patterns of CO2 variations in Seattle on time scales ranging from minutes to months.
Scientists from PMEL and NOAA’s Office of Exploration and Research are exploring the deep sea around Indonesia from an Exploration Command Center in Seattle, Washington. The NOAA ship Okeanos Explorer has satellite-enabled telepresence that allow scientists to stay on shore and be an integral part of the research as it happens across the Pacific Ocean in Indonesian waters.
You can follow the Okeanos Explorer on its first international operational mission and stay up to date with daily mission logs at the Ocean Explorer web site.