WEEKLY OCEAN NEWS

21-25 July 2008

DataStreme Ocean will return for Fall 2008 with new Investigations files starting during Preview Week, Monday, 25 August 2008. All the current online website products will continue to be available throughout the summer break period.

Ocean in the News:

• Eye on the tropics --- Tropical weather across the tropical ocean basins was active, with several named tropical cyclones (low pressure systems that are either tropical storms or hurricanes):
  • In the North Atlantic, Hurricane Bertha, the first hurricane of the 2008 North Atlantic hurricane season, continued to take a slightly erratic course to the northeast last week. After brushing by Bermuda as a category 1 hurricane, Bertha initially weakened and was reclassified as a tropical storm, but late last Friday it intensified to become a hurricane again as it moved to the northeast. By Sunday, it had weakened to become a tropical storm for the third time, as it continued to travel across the North Atlantic well to the east of Newfoundland. Tropical Storm Bertha has now become the longest-lived July named tropical cyclone in Atlantic history. Additional information concerning Bertha can be found on the NASA Hurricane Page. A set of four images generated from data collected by the sensors on the Tropical Rainfall Measuring Mission (TRMM) satellite over a 10-day span shows the rainfall rates from the clouds surrounding Bertha at varying stages in this system's life cycle. [NASA Earth Observatory]
    The third named tropical cyclone of the season, Tropical Storm Cristobal, formed Saturday morning off the coast of South Carolina and as of Sunday, was traveling northeastward over the coastal waters offshore of North Carolina with slight intensification.
    The fourth named tropical cyclone, named Tropical Storm Dolly formed in the western Caribbean Sea to the east of Belize on Sunday afternoon.
  • In eastern North Pacific, Hurricane Elida formed early last week and reached category 2 status on the Saffir-Simpson Intensity Scale. This hurricane continued to move westward across the Pacific before weakening and dissipating on Saturday. More information on Hurricane Elida can be found on the NASA Hurricane page.
    Tropical Storm Fausto also developed early last week offshore of the Mexican coast and intensified to a category 1 hurricane on the Saffir-Simpson Intensity Scale. It moved to the northwest paralleling the Mexican coast. As of late Sunday, this system was continuing to travel to the northwest. An image obtained from NOAA's GOES-10 satellite shows the clouds surrounding Hurricane Elida and Tropical Storm Fausto. [NOAA OSEI]
  • In the western North Pacific, Typhoon Kalmaegi formed over the Philippine Sea east of Luzon early last week. This typhoon, which reached category 2 status on the Saffir-Simpson Scale, brushed Taiwan and made landfall along the coast of China late Saturday. An image from the MODIS instrument on NASA's Terra satellite shows clouds surrounding Typhoon Kalmaegi as it was near Taiwan. [NASA Earth Observatory] Additional information appears in the NASA Hurricane page.
• Educators Climate Change Conference Event will have two featured speakers -- NOAA and NASA, along with support from the US Department of Energy, the U.S. Forest Service, Northrop Grumman Corporation, the National Environmental Education Foundation and the National Science Teachers Association will sponsor a K-12 educators climate change conference later this week (23-24 July) in Silver Spring, MD. Sally Ride, the first American woman in space, will give the keynote address and NOAA Senior Scientist Susan Solomon, Co-Chair of the 2007 Nobel Prize-winning Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change and the discoverer of the cause of the Antarctic ozone hole, will give a major address on climate. This event will be webcast live at www.sallyridescience.com/conference . [NOAA News]
• Penn State is awarded NOAA Sea Grant Program -- Penn State University’s Behrend College campus in Erie, PA has been designated recently as the Institutional Sea Grant Program for the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania by officials with NOAA’s National Sea Grant College Program. [NOAA News]
• Another "smart buoy" deployed on Chesapeake Bay historic trail -- On this past weekend, the NOAA Chesapeake Bay Office deployed a "smart buoy" at the mouth of Virginia's Rappahannock River as the fourth buoy in the Chesapeake Bay Interpretive Buoy System (CBIBS). This buoy near Stingray Point, which marks the Captain John Smith Chesapeake National Historic Trail, will take weather, oceanographic and water-quality observations of the Bay and transmit the data for use by the public on an essentially real-time basis. [NOAA News]
• Top fishing ports named for 2007 -- NOAA's Fisheries Service announced that the Alaskan port of Dutch Harbor-Unalaska was the top fishing port in terms of the number of lands with 777.2 million pounds of fish unloaded, while New Bedford, MA was ranked number one for the monetary value of landings ($268 million). [NOAA News]
• Slight decrease seen in recreational catch -- The NOAA Fisheries Service reported that marine recreational catch of 468 million fish during 2007 was down slightly from the record catch taken during the previous year, but 2007 catch remained the second most in over a decade. [NOAA News]
• Last year had a slight decrease in national seafood consumption -- According to a recently released study by NOAA's Fisheries Service, the annual national per capita consumption of fish and shellfish in 2007 was 16.3 pounds, a decrease of one percent from the previous year. [NOAA News]
• Gulf of Mexico's "dead zone" could be a record this summer -- Scientists from the Louisiana Universities Marine Consortium and Louisiana State University are forecasting that the oxygen depleted waters known as the "dead zone" in the Gulf of Mexico off the Louisiana and Texas coasts this summer could be expand to the size of New Jersey, to become the largest in the 24-year record. High river flows with large amounts of nutrients from the Mississippi and Atchafalaya rivers appear to be responsible for the projected dead zone increase. [NOAA News] Instruments on satellites, such as NASA's Sea-viewing Wide Field-of-view Sensor (SeaWiFS), provide information to researchers that allow them to monitor "dead zones." [NASA Earth Observatory]
• Ocean turns green off Iceland -- A MODIS image obtained two weeks ago from NASA's Aqua satellite shows the seasonal bloom of phytoplankton in the waters of the North Atlantic offshore of Iceland. [NASA Earth Observatory]
• Restoration of a Michigan lake gets international help -- A partnership between the State of Michigan, NOAA and the U.S.-Canadian Great Lakes Commission was launcher to restore the fish and wildlife habitat to Muskegon Lake and its surrounding area of Lower Michigan within the Laurentian Great Lakes Basin. [NOAA News]
• June 2008 was warm around the globe -- Analysis of preliminary average global land and ocean surface temperature data for the recently concluded month of June 2008 has led researchers at NOAA’s National Climatic Data Center to conclude that this month was the eight warmest since the start of worldwide records in 1880, with a temperature of 60.8 degrees Fahrenheit. They also noted that the first half of 2008 was the ninth warmest January – June period on record. [NOAA News]
• An update on the destruction of the Wilkins Ice Shelf -- An image obtained last week from the Advanced Synthetic Aperture Radar (ASAR) on the European Space Agency’s Envisat satellite provides continued evidence of the destruction of the Wilkins Ice Shelf off the Antarctic Peninsula. [NASA Earth Observatory]
• Pilot-less aircraft will see Greenland Ice Sheet up close -- Two low-flying remote controlled aircraft developed by NOAA’s Unmanned Aircraft Systems program in partnership with the Cooperative Institute for Research in Environmental Sciences (CIRES) and Advanced Ceramics Research will be used this month to observe the melting of the Greenland Ice Sheet and how the melting could contribute to a projected global rise in sea level by the end of this century. [NOAA News]
• Life in Atlantic is sustained by Saharan duststorms -- Researchers at the United Kingdom's University of Liverpool report that dust originating from duststorms over Africa's Sahara Desert settles out over the North Atlantic, helping sustain life in large areas of that ocean that have low nutrient levels. [EurekAlert!]
• Predatory lionfish threaten coral reef ecosystems -- Scientists from Oregon State University report that an invasion of predatory lionfish originally from the tropical Pacific and Indian Oceans into the waters of the Caribbean Sea has resulted in the decimation of local tropical fish populations, as well as posing a threat to the coral reefs in this region. [EurekAlert!]
• A coral health indicator may have been found -- Researchers at the University of Hawaii at Manoa have discovered a community of single-cell dinoflagellates, an algae that could be used as a potential indicator of the health of a coral ecosystem. [EurekAlert!]
• Mass extinction of marine life may have been caused by eruptions -- Earth scientists at the University of Alberta claim that their research provides evidence that lava fountains erupted on the sea floor, which altered the chemistry of ocean water and possibly the ocean, resulting in a mass extinction of sea life approximately 94 million years ago. [EurekAlert!]
• Submarine volcanic rocks viewed as greenhouse gas repository -- Scientists from Columbia University's Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory and other institutions have conducted deep ocean-floor drilling experiments to show that volcanic rocks in the waters off the West Coast of North America could be used to sequester huge quantities of anthropogenically generated carbon dioxide. [EurekAlert!]
• Scouring by icebergs affects marine biodiversity -- Scientists from the British Antarctic Survey (BAS) have shown that increased scouring of the West Antarctic Peninsula seabed by icebergs has affected marine life in the shallow waters surrounding the Peninsula. [EurekAlert!]
• Wind energy potential mapped over global oceans -- NASA researchers at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory have mapped the average wind intensity across the global oceans between 2000 and 2007 using data obtained from NASA’s Quick Scatterometer (QuickSCAT) satellite. The maps of wind power density shows areas of the oceans where potential wind farms could be located. [NASA Earth Observatory]
• An 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:

• 22 July 1986...Hurricane Estelle passed 120 miles south of the Hawaiian Islands creating a ten to twenty-foot surf. The large swells resulted from a combination of high tides, a full moon, and 50-mph winds. The hurricane also deluged Oahu Island with as much as 6.86 inches of rain on the 24th and 25th of the month. (Storm Data)
• 22-23 July 1996...A strong storm system centered south of Tahiti in the South Pacific was responsible for eight-foot surf along the south shores of Hawaii's Oahu Island. Water safety personnel rescued 95 people from the high surf. (Accord's Weather Guide Calendar)
• 23 July 1715...Boston Light, the first lighthouse in America was authorized by the Boston Light Bill for construction at Little Brewster Island, MA. This light, located on Little Brewster Island to mark the entrance to Boston harbor, has guided ships since its lantern was first lighted just before sunset, on 14 Sep 1716. In the 1600s, treacherous rocks caused countless loss of lives. False signal fires lit in the wrong places by "wreckers" lured ships aground to plunder. Boston Light was blown up by the British in 1776, but rebuilt in 1783 by Governor John Hancock. The lighthouse was also the last remaining staffed station in the U.S. (Today in Science History)
• 23 July 1788...A weather diary kept by George Washington recorded that the center of a hurricane passed directly over his Mount Vernon home. The hurricane crossed eastern North Carolina and Virginia before moving into the Central Appalachians. Norfolk, VA reported houses destroyed, trees uprooted, and crops leveled to the ground. (David Ludlum)
• 23 July 1958...USS Nautilus (SSN-571) departed Pearl Harbor, Hawaii for the first submerged transit of the North Pole. (Naval Historical Center)
• 23 July 1982...The International Whaling Commission decided to end commercial whaling by 1985-86. (Wikipedia)
• 24 July 1609...A fleet of ships carrying colonists to the New World met with a hurricane near Bermuda, resulting in much loss of property but little loss of life. (Northern Indiana NWSFO)
• 24-25 July 1979...Claudette, a weak tropical storm, deluged southeastern Texas with torrential rains. The Houston suburb of Alvin received 43.00 inches, a 24-hour precipitation record for not only the Lone Star State, but for the U.S. Freeport reported a total of 30 inches. Total damage from flooding was over $400 million. On the 27^th, a van loaded with people on their way to a church camp stopped on Texas Highway 7 due to a flooded bridge just west of Centerville. A truck rammed the van, pushing it into the flooded creek, resulting in five people drowning. (Intellicast) (David Ludlum) (NCDC) (Accord's Weather Guide Calendar)
• 24-26 July 1996...Although thousands of miles from southern California, an intense South Pacific storm south of Tahiti produced seven to ten foot surf with some sets up to 12 feet along the southern California coast. Lifeguards participated in more than 500 rescues along the beaches. (Accord's Weather Guide Calendar)
• 25 July 1956...The Italian ship Andrea Doria sank in dense fog near Nantucket Lightship, MA. Ten hours earlier, the ship was rammed by the Swedish-American liner, Stockholm, forty-five miles off the coast of Massachusetts. Fifty-two persons drowned, or were killed by the impact. (David Ludlum) (The Weather Channel)
• 25 July 1994...Hurricane Gilma, like Emilia a week earlier, reached Category 5 strength in the Central Pacific. (Intellicast)
• 27 July 1866...The 1686-mile long Atlantic Cable was successfully completed between Newfoundland and Ireland by the American businessman Cyrus W. Field, allowing transatlantic telegraph communication for the first time. Two previous attempts at laying a cable ended in failure. (Wikipedia) (Today in Science History)
• 27 July 1926...A hurricane came inland near Daytona Beach, FL. The hurricane caused 2.5 million dollars damage in eastern Florida, including the Jacksonville area. (David Ludlum)
• 27 July 1943...On a whim, and flying a single engine AT-6, Lieutenant Ralph O' Hair and Colonel Duckworth were the first to fly into a hurricane. It started regular Air Force flights into hurricanes. (The Weather Channel)

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Prepared by AMS DS Ocean Central Staff and Edward J. Hopkins, Ph.D., email hopkins@meteor.wisc.edu
ã Copyright, 2008, The American Meteorological Society.