Tag: Physical Oceanography

small gray Altius uncrewed aircraft system model in the foreground with the P-3 aircraft in the bsckground

NOAA Measures Hurricane Tammy from Satellites through the Sea

NOAA hurricane researchers successfully deployed a new uncrewed aircraft system (UAS) into Tropical Storm Tammy (2023) near an uncrewed surfance vehicle, saildrone, to measure parts of the storm too dangerous for humans to go. The Altius 600 UAS was launched from the NOAA WP-3D Orion Hurricane Hunter aircraft by scientists from NOAA’s Atlantic Oceanographic and Meteorological Laboratory during missions into the storm in coordination with the saildrone researchers and pilots.

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Shaun Dolk throwing a drifter over the side of a ship.

ERDDAP Server Increases Access to Drifting Buoy Data

The Global Drifter Program at AOML has a new ERDDAP, or Environmental Research Division Data Access Program, server that is now publicly available and hosts both hourly and 6-hour quality-controlled interpolated drifter datasets. This new scientific data server uses free and open-source software created by the Environmental Research Division of NOAA’s Southwest Fisheries Science Center.

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NOAA Satelite image of hurricanes Franklin and Idalia near the Southeastern United States

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

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 Welcomes 2023 Summer Interns

On National Intern Day, AOML is celebrating our largest internship class ever of 36 interns ranging from high school students to post doctoral fellows. They are joining us from schools across the country, from California to Florida, and are researching corals, microbes, hurricanes, air-sea interaction, ocean acidification, communications strategies, and much more, all within our 4 divisions:

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A very active 2017 Atlantic Hurricane Season: this satellite image shows three tropical storms - Katia, Irma and Jose - churning in the Atlantic at the same time. Image credit: NOAA.

Scientists at AOML Discover Atlantic Niño Fuels the Most Intense and Destructive Tropical Cyclones 

Scientists at NOAA’s Atlantic Oceanographic and Meteorological Laboratory (AOML) found that Atlantic Niño, the Atlantic counterpart of the Pacific El Niño, increases the formation of tropical cyclones off the coast of West Africa, also known as Cape (Cabo) Verde hurricanes. The study published in Nature Communications is the first to investigate the links between Atlantic Niño/Niña and seasonal Atlantic tropical cyclone activity and the associated physical mechanisms.

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Fifty-Five Days at Sea: Collecting Oceanographic Data from Brazil to Iceland

On May 9, a team of scientists aboard the NOAA Ship Ronald H. Brown arrived at their final destination in Reykjavik, Iceland following 55 days at sea. The team of 50 scientists and 28 crew members followed a track through the North Atlantic, from Brazil to Iceland, referred to as the A16N transect, and successfully completed 150 stations, collecting over 3,000 samples from the Atlantic’s surface to the seafloor, giving scientists a holistic snapshot of the Atlantic Ocean basin.

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A very large amount of orange/brown seaweed (sargassum) washed up on the coastline.

Extreme climate event in North Atlantic may have kicked off Sargassum explosion a decade ago

When massive mounds of golden-brown seaweed began piling up on beaches throughout the Caribbean and West Africa in summer of 2011, the question of where it came from probably mattered less to residents and businesses than how they were going to get rid of it. Certainly, few would have connected the Sargassum seaweed invasion to the extremely snowy 2010-11 winter in the eastern United States. But according to a hypothesis proposed by a team of NOAA AOML-led scientists in 2020, the two phenomena share an origin story: an extremely strong and long-lasting shift of the North Atlantic Oscillation into its negative phase back in 2010.

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Photo of Sargassum Floating in Open Water. Photo Credit: Credit: NOAA Teacher at Sea Program, NOAA Ship OREGON II Blue economy

Massive bloom of seaweed in tropical Atlantic raises the risk for Caribbean, Gulf, and Florida beach impacts in coming months

Earlier this year, ocean scientists raised an alert about the large amount of seaweed drifting in the tropical Atlantic this spring. Experts warned that the region’s annual spring bloom of Sargassum—a free-floating brown macroalgae from the North Atlantic that suddenly appeared in large quantities in the tropics in 2011— was the densest observed in March since scientists began tracking the phenomenon with satellite images twenty years ago. Excessive amounts of Sargassum raise the chances that large mats will break free from the prevailing currents and wash ashore later this spring and summer in the Caribbean, Gulf of Mexico, and around Florida.

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Eddies in the Caribbean Sea Influence the Prediction of the Loop Current in the Gulf of Mexico  

A recent study by scientists at NOAA’s Atlantic Oceanographic and Meteorological Laboratory (AOML) in collaboration with partners at the University of Miami’s Rosenstiel School of Marine, Atmospheric, and Earth Science used a numerical modeling approach to investigate the impact of the eddy field in the Caribbean Sea on Loop Current predictions downstream in the Gulf of Mexico. They found that eddy activity in the Caribbean Sea is crucial for the accurate prediction of eddy shedding by the Loop Current.

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NOAA Scientists Detect a Reshaping of the Meridional Overturning Circulation in the Southern Ocean

Scientists at NOAA’s Atlantic Oceanographic and Meteorological Laboratory (AOML) have shown that the Global Meridional Overturning Circulation (GMOC), commonly known as the global ocean conveyor belt, has changed significantly in the Southern Ocean since the mid-1970s, with a broadening and strengthening of the upper overturning cell and a contraction and weakening of the lower cell. These changes are attributed to human induced ozone depletion in the Southern Hemisphere stratosphere and increased carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. The study also shows that the changes in the Southern Ocean are slowly advancing into the South Atlantic and Indo-Pacific oceans.

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