Hurricanes are known to drive the cooling of surface waters as they travel over the ocean, leaving a cooling swath where they pass. The sea surface cooling is mostly caused by mixing forced by the strong winds of the hurricane, which occurs as the mixture of warm surface waters with colder waters that can be as deep as 100 m below the surface.
On October 15, 2015, the scientists, technicians, and engineers involved in the AOML Western Boundary Time Series (WBTS) project marked a milestone with the completion of the 100th successful dropsonde cruise in the Florida Current since the project’s inception in 2000.
In October, AOML scientists, technicians and engineers involved in the Western Boundary Time Series (WBTS) project completed the 100th successful dropsonde cruise in the Florida Current since the project’s inception in 2000. The dropsonde cruises measure volume transport in the Florida Current using an out-of-service telephone cable between Florida and Grand Bahama Island.
The results of two oceanographic cruises conducted in the Mexican and Belizean shelf waters over the Mesoamerican Barrier Reef during 2006 and 2007 show that the circulation can be divided into two distinct regimes: a northern region dominated by the strong, northward-flowing Yucatan Current, and a southern region with weaker southward coastal currents and the presence of the Honduras Gyre.
The earth is warming, but atmospheric and oceanic temperatures that rose steadily over the last half century have leveled off and slowed this past decade, causing the appearance of an imbalance in the Earth’s heat budget. Scientists looking to the deep ocean for where the additional heat energy might be stored recently traced a pathway that leads to the Indian Ocean.
With the 2015 Atlantic hurricane season underway, researchers are pointing to the strong presence of El Niño as the major driver suppressing the development of tropical cyclones in the Atlantic basin. But what specific conditions are associated with El Niño that lead to a less than ideal environment for tropical cyclone development? Through research and observation, hurricane researchers know strong environmental wind shear is a major factor affecting potential hurricane development and growth. This hurricane season, AOML researchers are delving further into the relationship between wind shear and tropical cyclones.
The pathways of recently ventilated North Atlantic Deep Water (NADW) are part of the lower limb of the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation (AMOC). In the South Atlantic these pathways have been the subject of discussion for years, mostly due to the lack of observations. Knowledge of the pathways of the AMOC in the South Atlantic is a first order prerequisite for understanding the fluxes of climatically important properties.
On July 14th, 2015, AOML physical oceanographers deployed one of two sea gliders in the Caribbean from the University of Puerto Rico’s R/V La Sultana. The third deployment will continue the project’s mission to gather important data in the Caribbean and Tropical North Atlantic Ocean to help with hurricane intensity forecasting and provide valuable information about the role the ocean plays in tropical cyclone development. What’s new for this mission? For the first time, the gliders will collect ocean current velocity profiles in addition to the real-time temperature, salinity, and oxygen data. AOML scientists also equipped the glider with an improved battery which will allow the glider to record more profile measurements. The second of the two gliders will be deployed in the Tropical North Atlantic in the upcoming weeks.
AOML physical oceanographers and interns conducted a hydrographic survey along the 27th north parallel in the Florida Straits aboard the R/V F.G. Walton Smith on July 14-15 as a component of the Western Boundary Time Series project. These 2-day cruises are designed to calibrate daily estimates and quantify Florida Current volume transport and water mass changes.
A team of researchers, including scientists from AOML and the University of Miami, set sail June 19th on a research cruise aboard the NOAA ship Gordon Gunter to provide increased understanding of ocean acidification and its drivers along the U.S. East coast. The cruise, which is part of a larger effort supported by NOAA’s Ocean Acidification Program, investigated near-shore and deep waters, and provided researchers with more detailed information about changing ocean chemistry in different environments.
