Congratulations to all of the 2022 Department of Commerce Bronze Award and NOAA Administrator’s Award winners! AOML is proud to recognize the achievements of our outstanding scientists and staff for their vital contributions to increasing the efficiency and effectiveness of NOAA. From creative problem solving in the face of unforeseen challenges to developing innovative tools […]
te of the Climate in 2021 report was released today by the American Meteorological Society, showing greenhouse gas concentrations, global sea levels, and ocean heat content reached record highs in 2021 despite a La Niña event taking place in the Pacific Ocean.
The international Argo Program, which includes NOAA’s Atlantic Oceanographic and Meteorological Laboratory, was recently awarded the Institute for Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) Corporate Innovation Award “for innovation in large-scale autonomous observations in oceanography with global impacts in marine and climate science and technology.”
In a recent article published in Frontiers in Marine Science, the history of the Argo program is examined and discussed. The Argo program began in 1998 when a team of international scientists, known as the “Argo Science Team,” proposed the idea for a global array of autonomous floats to obtain temperature and salinity measurements of the upper 2,000 meters of the global ocean. The new array of floats, called Argo, would go on to be endorsed as a pilot program of the Global Ocean Observing System and be used to fill in the large data gaps in ocean observations.
Staff with the US Argo Data Acquisition Center (DAC) at AOML marked an important milestone this past February by processing the one millionth profile from Argo floats. The DAC team has been processing and quality controlling all of the raw data obtained from US-deployed Argo floats since 2001, with about 90,000 temperature-salinity profiles processed annually since 2007. These profiles have provided the global scientific community with an unprecedented record of the evolving state of the upper ocean, advancing understanding of the ocean’s role in world climate.
The manuscript “An enhanced PIRATA data set for tropical Atlantic ocean-atmosphere research”, by Greg Foltz, Claudia Schmid, and Rick Lumpkin, was accepted for publication in Journal of Climate. It describes a new set of daily time series (ePIRATA) that is based on the measurements from 17 moored buoys of the Prediction and Research Moored Array in the Tropical Atlantic (PIRATA).
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.
Women’s History Month is celebrated annually in March and pays tribute to the generations of women whose contributions made a historical impact on society. It is also a month to honor women who are currently working hard to make positive innovations and impressions on the world.
In an article recently published in Climate Dynamics (Perez et al., 2013) , scientists in PhOD (R. Perez, R. Lumpkin, C. Schmid) described for the first time the mean vertical and cross-equatorial structure of the upper-ocean meridional currents in the Atlantic cold tongue region, using in situ observations including drifters, Argo, shipboard/lowered ADCP, and moored ADCP. This study involves collaborations with scientists from the University of Miami, Scripps Institution of Oceanography, and several international institutions and makes use of data from several major tropical Atlantic field programs including NOAA’s PIRATA Northeast Extension.
