WEEKLY OCEAN NEWS

2-6 January 2006

DataStreme Ocean will return for Spring 2006 with new Investigations files starting during Preview Week, Monday, 16 January 2006. All the current online homepage products will continue to be available throughout the break period.

Happy Holidays to everyone!

Sincerely,

Ed Hopkins and the AMS DS Ocean Central Staff

Ocean in the News:

• "Teacher at Sea" webpage launched -- The Special Projects Office at NOAA unveiled a new webpage for its Teacher at Sea Program that is intended at providing kindergarten through college educators with information on the project that provides first-hand research experience on one of NOAA's research vessels. [NOAA News]
• Sea Grant goes international -- The NOAA-supported Sea Grant Program that has included 30 universities across the US has expanded its scope of coastal resource use and conservation through research, education and outreach projects to include other countries in Latin America and eastern Asia. [NOAA Magazine]
• The tropical Atlantic continues to be busy -- As the calendar year 2005 closed, the 27th named tropical cyclone of the year in the North Atlantic Basin formed last Friday southwest of the Azores Islands as Tropical Storm Zeta. This new tropical storm not only is the 9th tropical system to form in the month of December since 1886, but is one of the latest to form during a year, tying Tropical Storm Alice, which formed on 30 December 1954 and became a hurricane on the following day. [Editor's Note: in 1954, the name list was recycled, so Alice was used twice. EJH] Tropical Storm Zeta continued to drift to the west-southwest across the central Atlantic on Sunday. Current forecasts indicated that Zeta should pose no threat to land and should weaken by the early part of this week. [USA Today]
• Coral reefs survive damage -- An official with the New England Aquarium recently announced that a survey of the coral reefs affected by the December 2004 tsunami in the Indian Ocean indicates that over one-third the reefs suffered minimal damage because of the tsunami and approximately half the reefs sustained moderate damage, while only 14 percent of the reefs were severely damaged or destroyed. [ENN]
• Damaged oil rigs to be used for marine life -- Many of the oil rigs in the Gulf of Mexico that were damaged by this year's hurricanes are to be converted into artificial reefs that will provide a habitat for fish and other marine life. [ENN]
• A guide to the tropical marine environment -- The Smithsonian Institution has assembled a scientific guide to the marine environment in Panama's Bocas del Toro Province, describing its coral reefs and coastal rainforests. [EurekAlert!]
• Whaling resumes off Antarctica -- After being pursued by two ships containing Greenpeace protestors, a Japanese whaling fleet began whaling in the waters off Antarctica a week ago. [ENN]
• Civilian navigation system launched -- The European Space Agency recently launched a satellite called GIOVE-A that represents a test vehicle for the Galileo satellite navigation system, a civilian version of the US military's GPS and the Russian GLONASS systems. All of these position-determining systems are used for regulating sea, air and land traffic. [The New Scientist]
• Saltwater threatens freshwater supplies -- With diminished river flow because of an extended drought in southern China, a wedge of saltwater from the South China Sea has been moving inland, threatening the freshwater supplies north of Hong Kong. [ENN]
• Results from the Grace mission -- Measurements of the minute changes in the earth's gravitational field made by the twin orbiting satellites in NASA/German Aerospace Center Gravity Recovery and Climate Experiment (Grace) have led to a variety of findings, including documentation of the decrease in the mass of the Greenland Ice Cap, measurements of the seasonal changes in the Antarctic Circumpolar Current and detection of the deformation of the earth's crust associated with the Sumatra earthquake and ensuing tsunami in December 2004. [NASA Earth Observatory] and [NASA JPL News]
• 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:

• 2 January 1955...Hurricane Alice battered the Leeward Islands with sustained winds of 85 mph on this day. Alice was upgraded as a full tropical system on 31 December 1954, making Alice the latest and earliest hurricane on record in the Atlantic Ocean. (Intellicast)
• 2 January 1993...Cyclone Kina battered Fiji with wind gusts to 130 mph and heavy rain. Up to 21.65 inches of rain fell in 24 hours, resulting in the worst flooding in 60 years. Twenty-three people were killed and damage was estimated to be in excess of 547 million US dollars. (Accord's Weather Calendar)
• 2 January 1998...Tropical Cyclone Ron (the Southwest Pacific's counterpart of a hurricane) destroyed most of the structures on Swains Island in American Samoa. The island's 49 residents sought safety in a concrete structure, which withstood the cyclone's 90-mph sustained winds. (Accord's Weather Calendar)
• 4 January 1493...The explorer, Christopher Columbus, began his return to Spain and completed his first journey to the New World. (Wikipedia)
• 5 January 1841...The British explorer, James Clark Ross, was the first to enter pack ice near Ross Ice Shelf off Antarctica.
• 5 January 1875...CDR Edward Lull, USN, began an expedition to locate the best ship canal route across Panama. This route was followed 30 years later. (Naval Historical Center)
• 5 January 1903...The general public could use the San Francisco-Hawaii telegraph cable across the Pacific cable for the very first time.
• 6 January 1839...A two-day storm off the Irish and English coasts was immortalized as "The Big Wind".
• 6 January 1898...The first telephone message from a submerged submarine was transmitted by Simon Lake, the father of the modern submarine.
• 6 January 1928...An intense low pressure system over the North Sea created a storm surge that moved upstream along the Thames River to London in England. Water rose over embankments. The rapid rise of the river resulted in 14 deaths in basements. As many as 40,000 people were left homeless. (Accord's Weather Calendar)
• 7 January 1904...The international Morse code distress signal "CQD" was established. Two years later, the 1906 International Conference on Wireless Communication at Sea, resolved that the radio distress signal should become "SOS" because it was quicker to send by wireless radio. (Wikipedia)
• 7 January 1927...Transatlantic telephone service began between New York and London, with 31 calls made on this first day.
• 8 January 1958...The Coast Guard LORAN Station at Johnston Island began transmitting on a 24-hour basis, thus establishing a new LORAN rate in the Central Pacific. The new rate between Johnston Island and French Frigate Shoal gave a higher order of accuracy for fixing positions in the steamship lanes from Oahu, Hawaii, to Midway Island. In the past, this was impossible in some areas along this important shipping route. (USCG Historian's Office)
• 8 January 1971...Twenty-nine pilot whales beached themselves and died at San Clemente Island, CA.
• 8-11 January 1980...Winds, waves and rain pounded Hawaii, resulting in 27.5 million dollars in storm damage, which was the greatest amount to that date in the Aloha State's history. Four houses were destroyed and 40 others damaged by a possible tornado in Honolulu's Pacific Palisades area on the 8^th. Ocean waves with heights to 20 feet entered beachfront hotels along the Kona Coast of the Big Island. (Accord's Weather Calendar)

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Prepared by AMS DS Ocean Central Staff and Edward J. Hopkins, Ph.D., email hopkins@meteor.wisc.edu
ã Copyright, 2006, The American Meteorological Society.