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.
Scientists at NOAA’s Atlantic Oceanographic and Meteorological Laboratory are in the Caribbean to launch two underwater gliders from a vessel off Puerto Rico to collect temperature and other weather data to improve hurricane forecasting.One of the gliders will collect observations in the Caribbean Sea, and another in the North Atlantic Ocean. They are positioned to operate over the next six months (June-November) collecting data in areas where hurricanes are common and areas where there is a lack of environmental data.
Researchers from PhOD and from the University of Cape Town used temperature data from the AX25 repeat XBT transect (from South Africa to Antarctica) in combination with other hydrographic and satellite observations to report a mechanism by which local winds alter the structure of the Antarctic Circumpolar Current flow south of Africa.
Results from collaborative research conducted by AOML and NOAA’s Southeast Fisheries Science Center (SEFSC) in response to the 2010 Deepwater Horizon oil spill, were recently published in Continental Shelf Research (December, 2013). PhOD oceanographers R. Smith, E. Johns, G. Goni, J. Trinanes, and R. Lumpkin, in collaboration with other researchers at AOML (M. Wood, C. Kelble, and S. Cummings) and SEFSC (J. Lamkin and S. Privoznik) report on the surface and subsurface connectivity across the eastern Gulf of Mexico (GOM) during July 2010.
Scientists at PHOD developed a synthetic method, which combines high-density expendable bathythermograph (XBT) temperature data along the AX08 XBT transect (which runs between Cape Town and NYC) with altimetric sea level anomalies, to estimate the variability of the off-equatorial currents, such as the North Equatorial Countercurrent and the North Equatorial Undercurrent, on seasonal to interannual timescales. Understanding how the ocean dynamics is liked to anomalies of temperature and wind-stress in the tropical Atlantic is critical to understand the climate and weather variability in the adjacent continental areas.
A joint workshop hosted by NOAA and the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) for bluefin tuna research was held at the University of Miami on December 6-7th. Researchers with AOML’s Physical Oceanography Division (PhOD) presented the results of their collaborative efforts with NOAA’s Southeast Fisheries Science Center (SEFSC), which have focused on the link between the ocean and stock assessment species of relevant commercial importance.
