Global Ocean Observing System - NOAA's Atlantic Oceanographic and Meteorological Laboratory

Monitoring vital signs: Tools and technologies at the heart of physical oceanography

AOML Communications — Tue, 10 Jun 2025 18:10:26 +0000

In 2018, an Australian couple curiously stumbled upon a bottle of gin washed ashore in Wedge Island, Australia. Yet, there was no gin inside. Rather, preserved within the bottle was a note with the date June 12th, 1886; the name of a German barque, Paula; the ship’s departure and arrival ports; and the exact coordinates […]

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Scientists at AOML measure ocean’s crucial buffering against rising global carbon emissions

Chris Malanuk — Wed, 15 Jan 2025 19:03:07 +0000

Every year, scientists at AOML participate in the international effort led by the University of Exeter’s Global Systems Institute in developing the annual Global Carbon Budget Report, an assessment of global carbon emissions and the progress towards achieving the climate goals set by the 2016 Paris Agreement. The 2024 Global Carbon Budget Report now indicates […]

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Ships of Opportunity: Crossing the Arctic to investigate the ocean’s uptake of carbon and increasing Ocean Acidification

AOML Communications — Thu, 26 Dec 2024 16:15:11 +0000

The air and surface temperature tip just above freezing. Cruiseliner Ponant’s 492-ft vessel Le Commandant Charcot floats idle at marked coordinates in the Arctic tundra between Alaska and Norway. On the aft deck, a team of scientists deploys Niskin bottles using a handcrank to the depths, collecting water samples 900 meters below an ocean blanketed […]

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NOAA’s Multi-Faceted Hurricane Data Collection Efforts Provide a Detailed View of Hurricanes Franklin and Idalia

AOML Communications — Thu, 07 Sep 2023 15:47:14 +0000

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 […]

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AOML Celebrates World Ocean Day

AOML Communications — Wed, 08 Jun 2022 16:42:17 +0000

The ocean produces at least half of the world's oxygen, is home to most of Earth’s biodiversity, and is the main source of protein for more than a billion people around the world. It is what makes life on Earth possible not only for humans, but for all organisms on our planet.

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International Argo Program Wins IEEE Award

AOML Communications — Fri, 06 May 2022 13:37:22 +0000

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.”

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GOMECC-4 Cruise Assesses Ocean Acidification Impacts in the Gulf of America

AOML Communications — Fri, 22 Oct 2021 12:34:00 +0000

AOML scientists and partners from an assortment of universities and Cooperative Institutes successfully completed the most comprehensive ocean acidification sampling of the Gulf of America to date with the conclusion of the fourth Gulf of America Ecosystems and Carbon Cruise, also known as the GOMECC-4 cruise. The research effort aboard the NOAA Ship Ronald H. Brown began out of Key West, Florida on September 13, 2021 with 25 scientists and graduate students aboard. It ended 39 days later on October 21 with a port stop in St. Petersburg, Florida.

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AOML Tests New Hurricane Ocean Profilers for Deployment in 2021 Hurricane Season

Grant Rawson — Wed, 24 Mar 2021 12:52:10 +0000

In January 2021, AOML in partnership with NOAA’s Aircraft Operations Center (AOC) completed the air launch testing of the Air-Launched Autonomous Micro-Observer (ALAMO) profiling float. This testing cleared the ALAMO floats for flight and deployed from the NOAA P3 Hurricane Hunter aircraft during their hurricane reconnaissance missions. The data collected and transmitted by the ALAMO floats will be used to understand the ocean’s interaction with tropical cyclones and improve coupled hurricane forecasting models.

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The Global Drifter Program Launches a New Interactive Map Tool

AOML Communications — Mon, 21 Dec 2020 15:30:03 +0000

The Global Drifter Program’s (GDP) Drifter Data Assembly Center (DAC) at AOML has launched a new interactive map of the global drifter array. This new tool features the ability to zoom and scroll, hover the cursor over drifters to get their identification numbers, and click to see data and metadata including deployment information, manufacturer, and drifter type in an ID card that can be viewed as a high-resolution image with an additional click.

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The Argo Program: Two Decades of Ocean Observations

AOML Communications — Wed, 14 Oct 2020 17:21:12 +0000

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.

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