Congratulations to Lev Looney, a University of Miami graduate student working at NOAA’s Atlantic Oceanographic Meteorological Laboratory (AOML), for surpassing his 1,000th student through the Skype a Scientist program!
NOAA and partners are improving hurricane forecasting by harnessing the power of new technologies and working to coordinate these technologies to predict hurricane track, intensity, and rapid intensification.
The NOAA Commissioned Officer Corps is one of the nation’s eight uniformed services and its officers are an integral part of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA). With approximately 330 officers and growing, the NOAA Corps supports nearly all of NOAA’s programs and missions. The combination of commissioned service and scientific expertise makes these officers uniquely capable of leading some of NOAA’s most important initiatives.
When massive mounds of golden-brown seaweed began piling up on beaches throughout the Caribbean and West Africa in summer of 2011, the question of where it came from probably mattered less to residents and businesses than how they were going to get rid of it. Certainly, few would have connected the Sargassum seaweed invasion to the extremely snowy 2010-11 winter in the eastern United States. But according to a hypothesis proposed by a team of NOAA AOML-led scientists in 2020, the two phenomena share an origin story: an extremely strong and long-lasting shift of the North Atlantic Oscillation into its negative phase back in 2010.
Earlier this year, ocean scientists raised an alert about the large amount of seaweed drifting in the tropical Atlantic this spring. Experts warned that the region’s annual spring bloom of Sargassum—a free-floating brown macroalgae from the North Atlantic that suddenly appeared in large quantities in the tropics in 2011— was the densest observed in March since scientists began tracking the phenomenon with satellite images twenty years ago. Excessive amounts of Sargassum raise the chances that large mats will break free from the prevailing currents and wash ashore later this spring and summer in the Caribbean, Gulf of America, and around Florida.
As a part of NOAA’s Atlantic Oceanographic and Meteorological Laboratory (AOML)’s 50th anniversary celebration, we would like to honor and remember AOML’s dedicated founder and first Director, Dr. Harris B. Stewart, Jr.
Coral scientists at NOAA’s Atlantic Oceanographic and Meteorological Laboratory (AOML) and University of Miami Cooperative Institute of Marine and Atmospheric Science (CIMAS) developed a new modeling approach, for evaluating coral reef persistence under climate change scenarios. Aiming to improve coral restoration efforts, this new user-friendly framework has been created as a helpful tool for coral reef scientists and managers to address the increasing vulnerability of these vital ecosystems.
Introducing a new social media series from NOAA’s Atlantic Oceanographic and Meteorological Laboratory (AOML): 12 Days of Instruments!
This series highlights 12 of the many instruments used by our researchers at AOML! Each of these instruments are vital to conducting our groundbreaking research.
