The Global Drifter Program at AOML has a new ERDDAP, or Environmental Research Division Data Access Program, server that is now publicly available and hosts both hourly and 6-hour quality-controlled interpolated drifter datasets. This new scientific data server uses free and open-source software created by the Environmental Research Division of NOAA’s Southwest Fisheries Science Center.
As Hurricanes Franklin and Idalia strengthened in late August, NOAA scientists collected critical data from the air, sea surface, and underwater to enhance forecasts and increase scientific knowledge. In less than two weeks, a fleet of strategically placed oceanographic instruments gathered temperature, salinity, and surface wind speed data, while NOAA’s Hurricane Hunter aircraft repeatedly flew […]
Today, September 6, the 2022 State of the Climate report was released by the American Meteorological Society, showing greenhouse gas concentrations, global sea levels, and ocean heat content reached record highs in 2022.
Sea level rise is one of the most challenging consequences of global warming. A new collaborative study led by Dr. Denis Volkov from NOAA-AOML and the University of Miami’s Cooperative Institute of Marine and Atmospheric Studies found that Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation (AMOC) induced changes in basin-wide ocean heat content are influencing the frequency of floods along the United States southeastern coast.
John T. Morris, Ian C. Enochs, et al.
Coral reef habitat is created when calcium carbonate production by calcifiers exceeds removal by physical and biological erosion. Carbonate budget surveys provide a means of quantifying the framework-altering actions of diverse assemblages of marine species to determine net carbonate production, a single metric that encapsulates reef habitat persistence. In this study, carbonate budgets were calculated for 723 sites across the Florida Reef Tract (FRT) using benthic cover and parrot fish demographic data from NOAA’s National Coral Reef Monitoring Program, as well as high resolution LiDAR topobathymetry. Results highlight the erosional state of the majority of the study sites, with a trend towards more vulnerable habitat in the northern FRT, especially in the Southeast Florida region (− 0.51 kg CaCO3m−2 year−1), which is in close proximity to urban centers. Detailed comparison of reef types reveals that mid-channel reefs in the Florida Keys have the highest net carbonate production (0.84 kg CaCO3 m−2 year− 1) and indicates that these reefs may be hold-outs for reef development throughout the region. This study reports that Florida reefs, specifically their physical structure, are in a net erosional state. As these reefs lose structure, the ecosystem services they provide will be diminished, signifying the importance of increased protections and management efforts to offset these trends.
A landmark study published last week demonstrates that the ocean’s role as a carbon sink and its ability to store anthropogenic, or human-caused, carbon may be weakening. A collaboration among international researchers led by Jens Daniel Müller, Ph.D. (ETH Zurich), this study captures a snapshot of three decades of global interior ocean measurements to determine […]
In a new study, scientists from NOAA, University of South Florida, Florida International University, University of Miami, and LGL Ecological Associates, compared wind information alongside Sargassum Inundation Risk (SIR) maps against citizen science reports of inundation in the coasts of Florida, Gulf of Mexico, Bahamas, and Caribbean regions. With present SIR maps, inundation is considered as more likely if large densities of satellite-detected Sargassum are near a coast. The scientists in the study found that shoreward wind velocity used in conjunction with SIR indicators greatly improves the agreement with coastal observations of Sargassum beaching compared to SIR indicators alone. Including wind metrics in SIR maps will allow for improved understanding of Sargassum trajectories in coastal areas for forecast purposes.
The growing concerns of coral bleaching due to the ongoing marine heatwave across South Florida, the Gulf of Mexico, and the greater Caribbean led scientists at NOAA’s Atlantic Oceanographic & Meteorological Lab (AOML) to return to Cheeca Rocks on July 31st and August 1st, 2023.
Webb, A.E., Enochs, I.C., van Hooidonk, R. et al. Restoration and coral adaptation delay, but do not prevent, climate-driven reef framework erosion of an inshore site in the Florida Keys. Sci Rep 13, 258 (2023).
For reef framework to persist, calcium carbonate production by corals and other calcifiers needs to outpace loss due to physical, chemical, and biological erosion. This balance is both delicate and dynamic and is currently threatened by the effects of ocean warming and acidification. Although the protection and recovery of ecosystem functions are at the center of most restoration and conservation programs, decision makers are limited by the lack of predictive tools to forecast habitat persistence under different emission scenarios. To address this, we developed a modelling approach, based on carbonate budgets, that ties species-specific responses to site-specific global change using the latest generation of climate models projections (CMIP6). We applied this model to Cheeca Rocks…
On National Intern Day, AOML is celebrating our largest internship class ever of 36 interns ranging from high school students to post doctoral fellows. They are joining us from schools across the country, from California to Florida, and are researching corals, microbes, hurricanes, air-sea interaction, ocean acidification, communications strategies, and much more, all within our 4 divisions:
