WEEKLY OCEAN NEWS

13-17 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 --
  • In eastern North Pacific basin, Hurricane Carlos, the second hurricane and the third named tropical cyclone of the 2009 hurricane season in the eastern North Pacific, formed near the end of last week over waters off the southwest coast of Mexico. By Sunday evening, Carlos, a minimal category 1 hurricane on the Saffir-Simpson Scale, was continuing to travel westward across the eastern Pacific. For more information and satellite imagery on Carlos, consult the NASA Hurricane Page. Earlier in the week, Tropical Storm Blanca formed south of Mexico's Baja California Peninsula and traveled to the northwest across the eastern North Pacific. Additional information on Tropical Storm Blanca can be found in the NASA Hurricane Page.
  • In the western North Pacific, Tropical Depression 6-W formed near Taiwan on Monday of this current week (local time) and was moving to the north-northwest toward mainland China. Earlier last week, Tropical Storm Soudelor, the fifth named tropical system of the year in the western Pacific, formed off Luzon in the Philippines and traveled westward across the South China Sea, passing across Hainan Island before making landfall in northern Viet Nam over the weekend.. Additional information concerning this system, also known as Gorio can be found on the NASA Hurricane Page.
• Oregon coastal habitat restoration receives stimulus fund awards -- The NOAA Administrator, Dr. Jane Lubchenco, recently announced that $7 million was awarded by her agency to three coastal habitat restoration projects in Oregon as part of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act funding. [NOAA News]
• New fisheries science center site is leased at Scripps -- Officials with NOAA and the University of California recently signed a 55-year ground lease that permits construction of NOAA’s Southwest Fisheries Science Center, a new federal laboratory and office center at the University of California, San Diego’s Scripps Institution of Oceanography campus in La Jolla. [NOAA News]
• New research vessel gets a home port -- NOAA officials recently agreed to lease a facility in Davisville, RI that will serve as the homeport of the NOAA Research Vessel, Okeanos Explorer, the agency's newest oceanic research ship. [NOAA News]
• Signs of El Niño have appeared ahead of upcoming boreal winter -- Scientists with NOAA's Climate Prediction Center announced last week that sea surface temperatures across eastern sections of the equatorial Pacific Ocean had increased to above long term averages, signaling a start to what is considered an El Niño event, or anomalous atmospheric and oceanic circulation patterns that can affect the global weather, ocean and climate conditions for several years. The forecasters expect El Niño to strengthen and to persist through at least the upcoming Northern Hemisphere winter. [NOAA News]
• Chesapeake crab population rebounds -- In a recently released report, identified as the "2009 Chesapeake Bay Blue Crab Advisory Report," fisheries scientists from the University of Maryland, Virginia Institute of Marine Science, Smithsonian Environmental Research Center, NOAA’s Fisheries Service and the states of Maryland and Virginia indicated that while Maryland blue crab population numbers had increased significantly last year, juvenile numbers remained low. [NOAA News]
• New geosynchronous environmental satellite is renamed -- During the last week, NASA engineers have continued to run tests on the new geosynchronous environmental satellite that was launched last month as GOES-O, the second in the GOES-N series designed to monitor environmental conditions across the Western Hemisphere. When the satellite was finally inserted into the proper orbit and its solar array deployed, the designation GOES-O was changed to GOES-14, and operational responsibility will be transferred to NOAA. [NASA Earth Observatory]
• Thinning of Arctic sea ice documented -- Scientists from NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory and the University of Washington have used data collected from the sensors on NASA's Ice, Cloud and land Elevation Satellite, (ICESat) over the last four winters to produce the first basin-wide estimate of the thickness and volume of the Arctic Ocean's ice cover. [NASA JPL]
• Effects of Hurricane Ike on coastal waterways and fish studied -- Researchers at the University of Houston are conducting a long-term environmental research project that will provide information on the long term effects that Hurricane Ike has had upon pollution levels in waterways along the Texas Gulf Coast and upon fish contamination. [EurekAlert!]
• Clean fuels could reduce deaths from marine smokestack emissions -- A researcher at the Rochester Institute of Technology claims that the use of cleaner fuels with lower sulfur levels to power ships could reduce the annual number of deaths from ship smokestack emissions by 40,000 people. [EurekAlert!]
• Growth of coastal cities is of concern -- Specialists from Norway, the United Kingdom, Germany and the United States attending a workshop organized by LOICZ (Land-Ocean Interactions in the Coastal Zone), a core project of the International Geosphere-Biosphere Programme and the International Human Dimensions Programme on Global Environmental Change cautioned that the rapid expansion of coastal cities around the globe without adequate coastal management has brought a false sense of security, as well as requiring a expensive infrastructure to protect the new inhabitants. [EurekAlert!]
• Dating time when Mediterranean algae lost their tropical element -- Researchers from Spain and Italy studying coralline algae fossils have concluded that these tropical type algae lived on the last coral reefs in the Mediterranean Sea between 7.24 and 5.3 million years ago, when the Mediterranean became isolated from the Indian Ocean, together with global cooling. [EurekAlert!]
• An ice-free Arctic basin found in an era with greenhouse conditions --- Researchers from the United Kingdom's University of Southampton and Cardiff University have found that the marine sediment record from the Arctic Ocean for the late Cretaceous (100 to 65 million years ago) shows ice-free summers and little winter sea ice during this time when high levels of atmospheric carbon dioxide resulted in a "greenhouse climate." [EurekAlert!]
• Changes in key atmospheric gases could affect the planetary hydrologic cycle -- Researchers from Lehigh University, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the Marine Biology Laboratory in Woods Hole, MA recently reported on their modeling experiment that shows future concentrations in atmospheric carbon dioxide along with nitrogen in the soil could play an important role in the cycling of water from the atmosphere to the land and then to the oceans through runoff. [NASA Earth Science News Team]
• Iron and manganese oxides used by methane-consuming microbes -- Researchers from Penn State University and the California Institute of Technology have found that iron and manganese compounds, in addition to sulfate, help anaerobic marine microbes convert methane to carbon dioxide and eventually carbonates in the oceans. These compounds may have helped reduce methane concentrations in the early Earth's atmosphere prior to high levels of oxygen. [EurekAlert!]
• 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:

• 13 July 1996...Heavy rains from the remnants of Hurricane Bertha caused roads to washout in the Camden, ME area. Two people were hurt when they drove into a 600-pound boulder that had fallen onto the roadway due to the heavy rain. (Accord's Weather Guide Calendar)
• 15-16 July 1916...A dying South Atlantic Coast storm produced torrential rains in the southern Appalachian Mountains. Altapass, NC was drenched with 22.22 inches of rain, a 24-hour rainfall record for the Tarheel State, and at the time, a 24-hour record for the U.S. (The current 24-hour rainfall record for the US is 43 inches set 25-25 July 1979 at Alvin, TX). Flooding resulted in considerable damage, particularly to railroads. (David Ludlum) (Intellicast) (NCDC)
• 17 July 1858...The U.S. sloop Niagara departed Queenstown, Ireland to assist in laying the first trans-Atlantic telegraph cable. (Naval Historical Center)
• 17 July 1994...The Polar Sea departed from Victoria, BC on operation Arctic Ocean Section 1994 and became the first U.S. surface vessel to reach the North Pole. She then transited the Arctic Ocean back to her homeport in Seattle, WA. (USCG Historian's Office)
• 17 July 1998...A tsunami triggered by an undersea earthquake destroyed 10 villages in Papua, New Guinea killing an estimated 1500 people, leaving 2000 more unaccounted for and thousands more homeless. (Wikipedia)
• 18 July 1986...Videotapes, taken by the deep-sea Alvin submersible, showing SS Titanic's remains were released. Looking like huge stalagmites, rusticles ("rust icicles") are a byproduct of the bacteria slowly converting the iron in the hull. The colony of iron-eating bacteria flourishes in the anaerobic (without oxygen) environment inside the hollow multi-layered rusticles while on the outside, porous layers support oxygen-dependent bacteria. In this eerie way, there is still life on the Titanic as the ship lies deep on the ocean floor. (Today in Science History)
• 18-19 July 1979...A 30-foot high tsunami wave leveled four Indonesian villages on the Sunda Islands during the night. The wave swept 1500 feet inland, causing 589 deaths among the sleeping villagers. A landslide from Mount Werung (Lomblen Island) caused the tsunami. (Accord's Weather Guide Calendar)
• 18-22 July 1997...Hurricane Danny, the only hurricane that made landfall in the continental US in 1997, moved inland into coastal Alabama at a snails pace. Radar storm total estimates of 43 inches over Mobile Bay. A torrential 32.52 inches of rain fell on 19-20 July at Dauphin Island Sea Lab, establishing a 24-hour maximum precipitation record for Alabama. (NCDC) (Accord's Weather Guide Calendar)
• 19 July 1843...The first all-metal liner, the SS Great Britain, was launched from Bristol, England. Designed by I. K. Brunel, the SS Great Britain was the first of the great steamships. She was the world's first screw-propeller driven (and first iron-hulled) steamship to cross the Atlantic (1845). The six-masted, single-screw, 3,270-ton vessel is 322 feet in length overall and carried a crew of 130 including 30 stewards for her 360-seat dining room. As the world's biggest ship of the time, she embarked on a varied career, first as a luxury liner carrying passengers to New York and Melbourne, then as a ferry carrying troops to the Crimea and India, and finally as a cargo ship, before being abandoned in the Falkland Islands in 1886. She was brought back to Bristol on this day in 1970, where she is now being restored by volunteers to her original appearance at the Great Western Dock in which she was built. (Today in Science History)
• 19 July 1886...A hurricane from the Gulf of Mexico crossed Florida causing great damage from Cedar Keys to Jacksonville. This was the third hurricane in one month to cross the Florida peninsula. (David Ludlum) (Intellicast)
• 19 July 1897...LT Robert E. Peary, USN, departed on a year long Arctic Expedition that made many important discoveries, including one of largest meteorites, Cape York. (Naval Historical Center)
• 19 July 1994...Hurricane Emilia was the first of three Category-5 hurricanes to develop in the Central Pacific in 1994 as unusually warm sea temperatures prevailed south of Hawaii. Sustained winds reached 160 mph. (Intellicast)

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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.