Tag: PIRATA Stories

Come Sail Away: Take a Look into a Scientist’s Life Aboard a 6 Week Cruise in the Tropical Atlantic

On February 24, researchers with NOAA’s Atlantic Oceanographic and Meteorological Laboratory returned to land, docking in Key West after nearly six weeks aboard the NOAA ship Ronald H. Brown. The scientists were at sea for the PIRATA (Prediction and Research Moored Array in the Tropical Atlantic) Northeast Extension (PNE) cruise, a joint effort between AOML and NOAA’s Pacific Marine Environmental Laboratory to maintain an expansion of the PIRATA array of surface moorings into the northern and northeastern sectors of the tropical Atlantic.

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AOML and Fearless Fund Team Up to Tackle Questions of Sargassum’s Life Cycle for Better Inundation Prediction Capabilities

The PIRATA (Prediction and Research Moored Array in the Tropical Atlantic) 2021 cruise aboard NOAA’s Ronald H. Brown has returned home! During their 41 days at sea, the cruise facilitated a collaboration between researchers with NOAA’s Atlantic Oceanographic and Meteorological Lab (AOML) and Fearless Fund, an organization dedicated to ocean solutions, supported by the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE). This collaboration targets the removal of carbon dioxide from ocean waters by the growth and harvest of seaweed biomass, known as Sargassum.

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An Enhanced PIRATA Data Set for Tropical Atlantic Ocean-Atmosphere Research

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).

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New Data Set to Improve Tropical Atlantic Ocean and Atmospheric Research

Researchers at NOAA AOML have released a new tropical Atlantic data set that includes several enhancements to improve data accuracy and data collection in the tropical Atlantic. The new data set is called enhanced PIRATA, or ePIRATA, and provides continuous records of upper-ocean temperature, salinity, and currents, together with meteorological data such as winds, humidity, and solar radiation. ePIRATA should prove valuable in better analyzing ocean and atmospheric processes in the tropical Atlantic.

PIRATA, the Prediction and Research Moored Array in the Tropical Atlantic, is a multinational observation network, established to improve knowledge and understanding of ocean-atmosphere variability in the tropical Atlantic. It is a joint project of Brazil, France and the United States of America, motivated by fundamental scientific issues and by societal needs for improved prediction of climate variability and its impact on the countries surrounding the tropical Atlantic basin. PIRATA provides measurements at 18 locations throughout the tropical Atlantic

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Mean Meridional Currents in the Central and Eastern Equatorial Atlantic

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.

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