A team of 20 NOAA scientists are in Goa, India, to meet with 200 of India’s leading ocean, atmosphere and fisheries scientists to mark a decade of productive collaboration on ocean and atmospheric observations, with life-saving economic benefits for both nations. The NOAA and Indian scientists will also board NOAA Ship Ronald H. Brown to launch new observational buoys in the Indian Ocean to improve the vitally important Indian Ocean observing system of buoys, a key tool for India and the United States to forecast everything from monsoons to severe weather in the United States.
NOAA met with ocean observations experts from six nations and 13 global organizations in May 2017 in Honolulu, Hawaii, to plan for the redesign of the Tropical Pacific Observing System by the year 2020 (TPOS 2020).
NOAA’s Climate Program Office announced today that it is investing $4.5 million in four projects to test technology designed to improve the Tropical Pacific Observing System, an array of buoys in the tropical Pacific used to better understand El Niño Southern Oscillation (ENSO), how it develops, and how it affects Earth’s weather.
Tornados are one of nature’s most destructive forces. Currently, our capacity to predict tornados and other severe weather risks does not extend beyond seven days. In a recent paper published in Environmental Research Letters, scientists with NOAA and the University of Miami identified how patterns in the spring phases of the El Niño-Southern Oscillation (ENSO), coupled with variability in North Atlantic sea surface temperatures, could help predict U.S. regional tornado outbreaks.
While people along our nation’s coast experience rising sea levels, residents along the Great Lakes – the Earth’s largest lake system – are adapting to the opposite problem: chronic low water levels and a receding shoreline.
In a perspective now running in Science magazine, Drew Gronewold, a hydrologist at NOAA’s Great Lakes Environmental Research Laboratory, says “the record low water levels in Lake Michigan-Huron in the winter of 2012 to 2013 raise important questions about the driving forces behind water level fluctuations and how water resource management planning decisions can be improved.”
NOAA and university researchers believe they have found a climate signal related to a specific phase of the El Niño-Southern Oscillation that could be linked to, and possibly serve as a predictor of, massive tornado outbreaks.