What's New Archive
Wendy Schmidt with Sunburst Sensors, winners of the Ocean Health XPRIZE.
The winners of the $2 Million Wendy Schmidt Ocean Health XPRIZE were announced yesterday at an awards ceremony held in New York. Winning first place in both the affordability and accuracy categories, Sunburst Sensors received $1.5 Million in prizes for two different sensor designs. ANB Sensors placed second in affordability, while Team DuraFET won second place in the accuracy category; each team took home $250,000.
During the ceremony, a Foreign Affairs panel addressing technology and policy supporting ocean health was held. The panel, which featured NOAA Chief Scientist Rick Spinrad, Stewart Patrick (Fellow, Council on Foreign Relations), Ghislaine Maxell (Founder, The TerraMar Project), and Sherri Goodman (CEO, Ocean Leadership), was attended by PMEL scientists that served as part of the Validation Team for the Ocean Health XPRIZE competition.
Read more about PMEL’s Carbon Group and their role in the Wendy Schmidt Ocean Health XPRIZE and watch this video about Sunburst Sensors to learn more about the winning team.
An Argo float on the cover of the State of the Climate in 2014.
The State of the Climate in 2014 report, published in July 2015 as a Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society supplement, highlights records in sea level, ocean heat content, and sea surface temperature, also documenting ocean climate variability including the borderline El Niño, the warm-water “Blob” in the Northeast Pacific, and a transition to the warm phase of the Pacific Decadal Oscillation. The cover features a PMEL Argo float, deployed in September 2007 and still active in July 2015. PMEL scientist Gregory Johnson co-edited the Global Oceans chapter of the report, composing haiku to summarize 2014 ocean variations:
Not quite El Niño, | North Oceans’ fluxes, warmth shift, | dance with weird weather.
and longer-term changes:
Seas warm, ice caps melt, | waters rise, sour, rains shift salt, | unceasing, worldwide.
Several PMEL, JISAO, and JIMAR scientists are section authors.
The results of a recent NSF-funded U.S. GEOTRACES research expedition were published in the latest issue of Nature. In this study, lead author and NOAA/PMEL and University of Washington/JISAO scientist Joseph Resing and colleagues unequivocally demonstrate the importance of submarine hot springs (hydrothermal vents) as a source of iron to the ocean interior. Iron is a trace nutrient that is critical to primary production in the ocean. Until recently, the scientific community thought that iron from hydrothermal vents was quickly removed from seawater near the hot springs, however during the expedition they measured hydrothermal iron more than 4,000 km (roughly the distance across the U.S.) from its source. Observations from the study were placed within a global ocean model, and the results suggest that the iron reaches the surface of the Southern Ocean where it supports phytoplankton growth and the transfer of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere to the deep ocean.
Read more about the Earth-Ocean Interactions program and the press releases from the University of Washington and Nature.
The Alutiiq Pride Shellfish Hatchery in Seward, Alaska.
Alaska currently has one shellfish hatchery in the state, but the industry is expected to expand to more than $1 billion in the next 30 years as demand for seafood increases. A new study, published in PLOS ONE, is a collaboration between NOAA/PMEL, the University of Alaska Fairbanks and the Alutiiq Pride Shellfish Hatchery in Seward, AK. This study is the first continuous monitoring of seawater conditions at an Alaska shellfish hatchery and it illustrates the potential vulnerability to ocean acidification in this industry. Under current conditions there is a 5-month window of favorable growing conditions for shellfish each year, but this window will shrink and may ultimately close as early as 2040 as water quality declines due to carbon dioxide. Hatcheries and natural shellfish populations will both be vulnerable to these declining growth conditions.
Cruise track for P16N outlined in yellow.
From April–June 2015, scientists on the NOAA ship Ronald H. Brown are collecting observations of Pacific Ocean water properties and currents from Tahiti to Alaska. This expedition is part of the US GO-SHIP Repeat Hydrography Program, an international effort to measure and observe the changing global ocean every decade. This particular cruise fortuitously crossed the equator during a developing El Niño and shortly after a transition to the warm phase of the Pacific Decadal Oscillation, allowing study of how these climate variations affect ocean conditions such as biological production and heat transport.
Read more about the US GO-SHIP program, leg 1 and leg 2 cruise blogs, the PMEL Carbon Program Repeat Hydrography page, the Large-Scale Ocean Physics page, and the Ocean Tracer group.
The Saildrone with NOAA ship Oscar Dyson in the background. Photo credit: Mark Frydrych
In April, PMEL and JISAO scientists and engineers teamed up with Saildrone, Inc. to test two Saildrones in the harsh environment of the Bering Sea for the first time. The unmanned instruments sailed from Dutch Harbor, AK on April 22. They have traveled over 2,000 miles each since then, taking over 40 million measurements as they sail north following the ice retreat. With the Arctic environment changing rapidly, the success of these vehicles couldn’t come at a better time. The measurements taken across the eastern Bering Sea have the potential to provide a comprehensive picture of the changes that occur in the late spring environment when the ice is retreating.
Read more about this research on the NOAA Research page and the Innovative Technology for Arctic Exploration site.
PMEL scientists and local residents celebrate renewed collaboration.
PMEL Tropical Moored Buoy Array technicians Patrick Berk and Bill Higley recently completed a collaborative RAMA cruise aboard Indonesian Research Vessel Baruna Jaya 1. While in Indonesia, they participated in formal ceremonies celebrating the pending bilateral agreement between PMEL and Indonesia's meteorology and climatology agency, BMKG. This cruise marked a new phase of U.S. – Indonesian cooperation to better understand ocean-climate variability and how it affects the planet, and builds on years of cooperation between the two countries.
The RAMA array of surface and subsurface moorings in the Indian Ocean complements NOAA’s tropical moored arrays in the Atlantic Ocean, the Prediction and Research Moored Array in the Tropical Atlantic (PIRATA), and in Pacific Ocean, the Tropical Atmosphere Ocean (TAO) array, and Japans Triangle Trans-Ocean Buoy Network (TRITON). RAMA will improve description, understanding, and prediction of Asian monsoons, which affect one third of the world’s population. Learn more about the Global Tropical Moored Buoy Array group.
PMEL scientists on the R/V Kilo Moana. Photo credit: NOAA/PMEL
PMEL scientists Richard Feely and Chris Sabine, and JISAO scientists Adrienne Sutton and Remy Okazaki, have just embarked on the R/V Kilo Moana for the final phase of the $2 million Wendy Schmidt Ocean Health XPRIZE. As members of PMEL’s Ocean Carbon group, the team is providing the actual pH measurements for comparison to the measurements taken by new sensors developed by XPRIZE contestants. The competition has been reduced to 5 teams, each vying for the Accuracy Purse. The contestants will put their sensors through rigorous performance tests focused on stability and precision at up to 3,000 meters (almost 2 miles) deep.
More information can be found at NOAA Research, PMEL Ocean Carbon, Wendy Schmidt Ocean Health XPRIZE, and the University of Washington/Joint Institute for the Study of the Atmosphere and Ocean websites. Follow the XPRIZE cruise blog.
Kjell-Sture Johansen (NORUT), Dan Mock (AUV), Andreas TØllefsen (NORUT), Rune Storvold (NORUT), Scott Stalin (PMEL), Nick Delich (PMEL), Jim Johnson (PMEL), Hagen Teig (ESRL),Brad Hooper (AUV), Tej Dhakai (LDEO), and Scott Brown (LDEO) with partner groups after the final mission. Photo credit: Kjell-Sture Johansen
PMEL atmospheric chemists Trish Quinn and Tim Bates teamed up with other scientists and engineers to measure black carbon (soot) in the climate sensitive Arctic region. The scientists launched out of Ny-Ålesund, Norway using Mantas, an unmanned aerial systems (drones) to take measurements in the atmosphere, using a suite of sensors that could capture particle size and composition, light scattering properties and tracers that help detect the geographic origin of the particles. Scientists and engineers completed a total of 26 flights during this field season, in addition to sampling snow on the ground for black carbon deposition measurements. The data from flights and snow will help scientists better understand how black carbon is transported to the Arctic and to constrain its contribution to ice melt and warming in the Arctic.
For more information, read here about the 2015 field season and visit the Atmospheric Chemistry webpage.
Axial Seamount is located off the west coast of the U.S. Credit: Bill Chadwick
PMEL and Oregon State University(OSU)/CIMRS scientist Bill Chadwick and Scott Nooner at the University of North Carolina Wilmington (UNCW) have successfully forecast the latest eruption of Axial Seamount, an active submarine volcano located about 300 miles off the coast of Oregon. Based on a swarm of earthquakes and large vertical movements of the seafloor, the eruption started on April 24, 2015. While instruments at the site clearly picked up on these signals, the activity is not strong enough to be felt by anyone on land or large enough to produce a tsunami. In the fall of 2014 the scientists posted a blog predicting that Axial would erupt within the next 15 months. They based their prediction on a repeated pattern of seafloor elevation changes before, during, and after eruptions since 1998.
This work has been possible through a cooperative effort that includes the PMEL Earth-Ocean Interactions Program, OSU/CIMRS, the University of Washington-led OOI Cabled Array, Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute, Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory, UNCW and was funded by the National Science Foundation and NOAA. Please see the OSU press release.