WEEKLY OCEAN NEWS

21-25 May 2012

DataStreme Ocean will return for Fall 2012 with new Investigations files starting during Preview Week, Monday, 27 August 2012. All the current online website products will continue to be available throughout the summer break period.

Items of Interest:

National Maritime Day will be observed-- Next Tuesday, 22 May 2012, has been declared National Maritime Day, a day created to recognize the maritime industry. The holiday was created by the United States Congress on 20 May 1933. The date of 22 May was selected because on 22 May 1819, that the American steamship Savannah set sail from Savannah, GA on the first ever transoceanic voyage under steam power.
The annual European Maritime Day Conference will be held in Gothenburg, Västra Götaland, Sweden from 21 to 22 May. The theme of this year’s conference is “Sustainable growth from the oceans, seas and the coasts: Blue growth”. [Editor's Note: This conference will be held in conjunction with European Maritime Day 2012, which is celebrated annually 20 May with the aim to raise awareness of the importance of the sea among the European citizens. The European Maritime Day was established jointly by the European Council, the European Parliament and European Commission in 2008 as part of the European Union's (EU) maritime policy. EJH]
North American Safe Boating Week -- This week of 19-25 May has been declared 2012 National Safe Boating Week, to help kick off the 2012 North American Safe Boating Campaign. Check the Safe Boating Week site maintained by the Safe Boating Council.
New director of NOAA's National Hurricane Center is named -- Last Friday Rick Knabb, PhD was named the new director of NOAA's National Hurricane Center in Miami, to replace the retiring current director, Bill Read, effective in early June. Dr. Knabb may be familiar to those who watch The Weather Channel, as he has been their hurricane expert for the last two years. [NOAA News]

Ocean in the News:

Eye on the tropics --- The first tropical cyclone of the 2012 hurricane season in the eastern North Pacific basin formed early last week as a tropical depression off the southwest coast of Mexico and intensified to become Tropical Storm Aletta last Tuesday (15 May 2012), the official date of the beginning of the official hurricane season in the eastern North Pacific (east of 140 degrees West longitude). Aletta traveled westward as a minimal tropical storm and then and northward as a tropical depression. On Saturday, this system began to dissipate. For additional information on Tropical Storm Aletta along with satellite imagery, see the NASA Hurricane Page. The earliest hurricane of the season in the eastern North Pacific basin was Hurricane Alma, a category 1 hurricane on the Saffir-Simpson Scale that formed on 12 May 1990 and reached hurricane status on the 15th.
In the North Atlantic Basin, Tropical Storm Alberto formed late Saturday afternoon over the waters off South Carolina. On Sunday, Alberto traveled slowly to the southwest toward the Georgia coast. This first tropical cyclone of 2012 was nearly two weeks earlier than the official start of the 2012 hurricane season in the North Atlantic Basin. The earliest recorded Atlantic hurricane for a season was an unnamed hurricane on 7 March 1908.
ENSO conditions follow La Niña event -- Scientists at NOAA's Climate Prediction Center report that ENSO-neutral conditions have returned, replacing the La Niña conditions that had lingered for the last several months. (ENSO means El Niño-Southern Oscillation and ENSO-neutral conditions are found when neither El Niño nor La Niña conditions are apparent.) Equatorial sea surface temperatures were found to be near average across much of the equatorial Pacific, except for the far eastern Pacific Ocean where above average sea surface temperatures were noted. The ENSO-neutral conditions were expected to continue through Northern Hemisphere summer 2012. [NOAA Climate Prediction Center]
Review of global weather and climate for April 2012 -- Using the combined global land and ocean surface temperature from preliminary weather data, scientists at NOAA's National Climatic Data Center have determined that April 2012 was the fifth warmest April since global climate records began in 1880. Furthermore, the average global ocean surface temperature for April was the eleventh highest since 1880, while the global land surface temperature was seventh highest on record. The La Niña event that had lingered for the previous several months finally dissipated as sea-surface temperatures across the equatorial Pacific Ocean increased.
Although the areal coverage of Arctic sea ice remained slightly below the 1979-2010 average, the April 2012 coverage was the 17th largest April extent since satellite surveillance began in 1979. The extent of Antarctic sea ice was above average and was the sixth largest April extent in the 34-year period of record.
The snow cover across the Northern Hemisphere was the fourth smallest for any April since records started in the late 1960s. The North American snow cover for April 2012 was the eighth smallest on record. [NCDC State of the Climate][NOAA Environmental Visualization Laboratory]
Inventory of nation's protected marine waters is made -- NOAA has recently updated its inventory of the nation's coastal waters and found that eight percent of these waters are currently designated as marine protected areas (MPAs). However, a majority of these protected waters allow human uses, including fishing, swimming and kayaking. [NOAA News]
Record number of rebuilt fisheries reported -- In the "NOAA's Status of U.S. Fisheries" report made to Congress early last week, NOAA's Fisheries Service reported a record number of six fish populations to healthy levels during 2011, bring to 27 the number of rebuilt US marine fish populations in the last 11 years. [NOAA News]
Shipwreck off Massachusetts coast placed on historic registry -- The wreck of the Lamartine, a 19th century schooner located in the waters of the NOAA's Stellwagen Bank National Marine Sanctuary off the Massachusetts coast, has been placed on the list of the National Register of Historic Places. This 79-foot, two-masted cargo schooner hauled granite for construction purposes along the US East Coast and sank during a storm off Cape Ann in May 1893. [NOAA News]
Modern technology helps discover 19th-century shipwreck in Gulf of Mexico -- Using underwater robots during a recent Gulf of Mexico expedition conducted by NOAA, the US Interior Department's Bureau of Ocean Energy Management (BOEM)and partners, scientists discovered the remnants of an historic wooden-hulled vessel believed to have sunk approximately 200 years ago. [NOAA News]
Scientific cooperation between US and Japan strengthened by launch of new environmental monitoring satellite -- Last week, the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) launched the Global Change Observation Mission 1 - Water (GCOM-W1) satellite. Also known as "SHIZUKU" ("water drop"), this polar-orbiting satellite is designed to observe the Earth's environment. In a Memorandum of Understanding, US scientists from NOAA will be able to use the data collected by the Advanced Microwave Scanning Radiometer 2 (AMSR-2) onboard this satellite, which will be crucial for tracking sea-surface temperatures, support near real-time weather and ocean forecasts and monitor changes in climate as exemplified by changes in sea ice and the occurrence of El Niño and La Niña events. [NOAA News] [NOAA Environmental Visualization Laboratory]
Monitoring average chlorophyll concentrations along the coasts of the Americas -- An image was generated that shows the average chlorophyll concentration of the coastal waters of North and South America during April 2012 from data collected by the MODIS sensor on board the NASA Aqua satellite. These images are used by NOAA for fisheries and coastal ecosystem management, as well as for identifying potential human health impacts from harmful algal blooms. [NOAA Environmental Visualization Laboratory]
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, drought, floods, 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, to include drought, floods and storms during the current month. [NCDC]
Earthweek -- Diary of the Planet [earthweek.com] Requires Adobe Acrobat Reader.

Historical Events:

22 May 1819...The steamship SS Savannah left Savannah, GA on a voyage to Liverpool, England and became the first steamship to cross the Atlantic Ocean. It reached Liverpool on 20 June. (Wikipedia)
22 May 1849...The future President, Abraham Lincoln, received a patent for the floating dry dock described as for "buoying boats over shoals" (No. 6,469). He was the first American president to receive a patent. His idea utilized inflated cylinders to float grounded vessels through shallow water. (Today in Science History)
22-24 May 1948...A rare early season hurricane struck the island of Hispaniola, killing an estimated 80 people. (The Weather Doctor)
22 May 1960...A 8.6 magnitude earthquake off the coast of south central Chile triggered a tsunami that moved across the Pacific Ocean. Between 490 and 2290 people were estimated to have been killed by the earthquake and tsunami, and damage estimates were over one half billion dollars. Hilo, HI was devastated by the tsunami. (The University of Washington)
23 May 1850...The US Navy sent USS Advance and USS Rescue to attempt rescue of Sir John Franklin's expedition, lost in Arctic. (Naval Historical Center)
23 May 1946...Commodore Edward M. Webster, USCG, headed the U.S. Delegation to the International Meeting on Radio Aids to Marine Navigation, which was held in London, England. As a result of this meeting, the principal maritime nations of the world would make an intensive study of the World War II-developed devices of radar, LORAN, radar beacons, and other navigational aids with a view to adapt them to peacetime use. This meeting was the first time that the wartime technical secrets of radar and LORAN were generally disclosed to the public. (USCG Historian's Office)
23 May 1960...Tsunami waves from Chilean earthquakes began to affect the Alaska's coast along the Gulf of Alaska from Prince of Wales Island to Montague Island for as long as one week. The tsunami waves on the 23rd were up to 14 feet high near Yakutat. (Accord's Weather Guide Calendar)
24 May 1500...The 13 ships in the fleet of Portuguese navigator Pedro Alvares Cabral were hit by a huge ice storm that sank four ships. The rest of the ships were separated as they sailed south of the Cape of Good Hope and continued their journey to India.
24 May 1901...The relative humidity at Parkstone, Dorset in England at 4 PM was reported to be 9.5 percent. This low relative humidity is not typical of the British Islands, which are surrounded by ocean water and have no large high mountain barriers or plateaus. (Accord's Weather Guide Calendar)
24 May 1951...Northeast gales generated waves to 15 feet high in the harbor of Newport, RI. A 50-ft. Navy launch with about 142 men on board capsized. Nineteen of the men drowned in the incident. (Accord's Weather Guide Calendar)
24 May 1992...Winds up to 40 knots and seas to 18 feet in the northern Gulf of Alaska, approximately 30 miles southwest of Alaska's Cape Cleare, sent three waves crashing over the Cajun Mama. The 80-ft fishing boat sank, but the crew of five was rescued. (Accord's Weather Guide Calendar)
25 May 1985...The Meghna River delta in Bangladesh was hit with a tropical cyclone with winds of over 100 mph that created a 15-to 20-foot high storm surge that flooded a 400-square-mile area, mainly islands located in the mouth of the river. More than 11,000 people and 500,000 head of cattle died and hundreds of thousands were left homeless because of this cyclone.
26 May 1967...A slow moving nor'easter battered New England with high winds, heavy rain, and record late season snow on this day and into the 26th. Winds 70 to 90 mph in gusts occurred along the coast. Over 7 inches of rain fell at Nantucket, MA with 6.57 inches falling in 24 hours to set a new 24-hour rainfall record. Severe damage occurred along the coast from very high tides. The 24.9 inches of snow that fell at Mount Washington, NH set a new May snowfall record. Other locations in New Hampshire received 10 inches of snow near Keene and 6 inches at Dublin. (Intellicast)