WEEKLY OCEAN NEWS

6-10 July 2009

DataStreme Ocean will return for Fall 2009 with new Investigations files starting during Preview Week, Monday, 31 August 2009. All the current online website products will continue to be available throughout the summer break period.

Ocean in the News:

• Eye on the Tropics -- During the second week following the summer solstice in the Northern Hemisphere, the weather across the tropical ocean basins remained uncharacteristically quiet, as no organized tropical cyclones formed.
• Sea surface temperatures in Atlantic basin monitored for tropical cyclone development -- An image of the sea surface temperatures across the North Atlantic, the Caribbean Sea and the Gulf of Mexico at the end of June 2009 was produced from data collected by the MODIS and Advanced Microwave Scanning Radiometer for EOS sensors onboard NASA's Aqua and Terra satellites. While temperatures across the central and western Caribbean, the Gulf of Mexico and the western Atlantic off the Southeast coast were sufficiently high to support tropical cyclones, the waters of the tropical Atlantic between Africa and the Americas remained too cool, which may have contributed to the lack of activity across the basin. [NASA Earth Observatory]
• New online video of 2008 hurricane season unveiled -- The GOES Project at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center has developed and put online a video that shows the life cycles and travels of tropical cyclones (tropical depressions, tropical storms and hurricanes) across the North Atlantic Basin during the 2008 hurricane season. Data were used from the GOES (Geostationary Operational Environmental Satellite)-12 satellite operated by NOAA and the Moderate Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) instrument on NASA's Terra satellite. [NASA GSFC]
• A new hurricane education resource is launched -- A new website was recently launched by the Hurricane Roadmap Project that is designed to promote a better understanding of the information provided by hurricane forecasts. [Hurricane Roadmap Project]
• New type of El Niño could produce more landfalling hurricanes -- Climatologists at the Georgia Institute of Technology hypothesize that the types of El Niño events recently occurring could be evolving into a new type that permits a greater than average number of Atlantic hurricanes, along with a higher potential for landfall. While El Niño events are associated with warming of the eastern Pacific and fewer Atlantic hurricanes, this new type is identified as El Niño Modoki (from the Japanese meaning "similar, but different"), has warming in the central equatorial Pacific. [USA Today] [EurekAlert!]
• Five thoughts about hurricane research -- A scientist who specializes in hurricane research with NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Bjorn Lambrigtsen, recently summarized his thoughts concerning the development of hurricanes and other tropical cyclones. [NASA JPL]
• Hand-held aerosol sensors to collect data over oceans -- A scientist from NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center working on the Aerosol Robotic Network (AERONET) is attempting to establish the Maritime Aerosol Network (MAN) that would provide portable photometers to researchers on oceanographic research cruises so they could measure the concentrations of aerosols over the data-sparse oceans. [NASA Earth Science News Team]
• Western Nordic Sea has least ice since 13th century -- Using a variety of historical records and ice cores, researchers at Denmark's Niels Bohr Institute who reconstructed an 800-year sequence of the sea ice extent over the seawaters between Greenland and Svalbard report that the areal coverage of the current sea ice is the smallest since the 13th century. [EurekAlert!]
• Loss of coastal seagrass habitat found around the world -- Researchers from the United States, Spain and Australia warn that the loss of seagrass meadows during the last 20 years has been accelerating, a signal that the immediate health and long-term sustainability of coastal ecosystems are being threatened. [EurekAlert!]
• Animals in mangrove ecosystems are threatened -- A study by researchers at the University of Maryland and the Smithsonian Migratory Bird Center warns that nearly half the animal species restricted to the mangrove ecosystems around the world are threatened with extinction as their habitat is being lost or degraded rapidly because of coastal development, overexploitation, pollution, and changes in sea level and salinity. [EurekAlert!]
• King crabs avoid warm water by diving deeper -- Researchers from the United Kingdom's National Oceanography Centre, Southampton, using 200 years of data collected from scientific expeditions have found that the various species of king crab tend to avoid warm near surface ocean water by spending much of their time in the colder deep waters. [EurekAlert!]
• Coastal restoration projects to receive Recovery Act funding -- At the end of last month, US Department of Commerce Secretary Gary Locke announced that 50 marine and coastal restoration projects on the coasts of the Atlantic, Pacific and the Gulf of Mexico, along with the Great Lakes would receive $167 million as part of the funding provided by the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 funding. [NOAA News]
• All-Hazards Monitor -- This Web portal provides the user information from NOAA on current environmental events that may pose as hazards such as tropical weather, marine weather, tsunamis, rip currents, Harmful Algal Blooms (HABs) and coral bleaching. [NOAAWatch]
• Global and US Hazards/Climate Extremes-- A review and analysis of the global impacts of various weather-related events, including drought, floods and storms during the current month. [NCDC]
• Earthweek -- Diary of the Planet [earthweek.com] Requires Adobe Acrobat Reader.

Historical Events:

• 6 July 1484...Portuguese sea captain Diogo Cão located the mouth of the Congo River. (Wikipedia)
• 6 July 1988...The world's worst offshore accident occurred when 167 oil workers were killed by explosions and fires that destroyed the Piper Alpha drilling platform in the British sector of the North Sea.
• 7 July 1901...First three-day weather forecast issued for the shipping lanes of the North Atlantic. (Northern Indiana NWSFO)
• 7 July 1952...The liner SS United States made the fastest-ever eastbound crossing of the Atlantic of 3 days, 17 hours and 48 minutes on her maiden voyage from Nantucket Light Ship off New York's Long Island to Bishop Rock Lighthouse in western England.
• 8 July 1497...The Portuguese explorer, Vasco da Gama, set sail from Lisbon, Portugal with four ships on the first direct European voyage to India, first rounding Africa's Cape of Good Hope and reaching Calicut on India's southwest coast on 20 May 1498. (Wikipedia)
• 8 July 1879...The first ship to use electric lights departed from San Francisco, CA.
• 11 July 1576...The British seaman Martin Frobisher sighted Greenland during one of his attempts to find the Northwest Passage. (Wikipedia)
• 11 July 1776...The English explorer Captain James Cook began his third and final voyage, exploring the North Pacific, western North America to as far north as the Bering Strait and the Sandwich Islands (later renamed the Hawaiian Islands), where he was killed in February 1779. (Wikipedia)
• 12 July 1844...Captain J.N. Taylor of the Royal Navy first demonstrated the fog horn. At the time, it was called a telephone - to mean far-signaling, thus an instrument like a fog-horn, used on ships, railway trains, etc., for signaling by loud sounds or notes. The 19 July 1844 Times (London) reported, "Yesterday week was a levee day at the Admiralty, and amongst the numerous models...was Captain J. N. Tayler's telephone instrument... The chief object of this powerful wind instrument is to convey signals during foggy weather. Also the Illustrated London News on 24 Aug. 1844 referred to "The Telephone; a Telegraphic Alarum. Amongst the many valuable inventions...that of the 'Telephone, or Marine Alarum and Signal Trumpet', by Captain J. N. Taylor." (Today in Science History)
• 12 July 1920...The Panama Canal was formally dedicated, having taken more than 30 years to overcome the enormous engineering challenges and complete at a cost of $347 million. The first ship had traveled through six years earlier when the Panama Canal opened to shipping on 15 Aug 1914. At that time, the world scarcely noticed the event since German troops were driving across Belgium toward Paris and the newspapers relegated the Panama story to their back pages; the greatest engineering project in the history of the world had been dwarfed by the totality of World War I. (Today in Science History)
• 12 July 1993...A magnitude 7.8 earthquake that was situated offshore of Hokkaido, Japan produced a tsunami that killed 202 people on the island of Okushiri. (Wikipedia)

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Prepared by AMS DS Ocean Central Staff and Edward J. Hopkins, Ph.D., email hopkins@meteor.wisc.edu
ã Copyright, 2009, The American Meteorological Society.