This blog post by Jeremy Mathis, director of NOAA's Arctic Research Program, is the first in a series of posts from NOAA scientists aboard US Coast Guard Cutter Healy who are measuring Arctic environmental change.
On Friday, August 25, U.S. Coast Guard Cutter Healy will sail from Dutch Harbor, Alaska, with a team of NOAA scientists and collaborators on a 22-day cruise to study environmental change in the western Arctic Ocean.
The Montreal Protocol, the international treaty adopted to restore Earth’s protective ozone layer, has had a major side benefit - reducing climate-altering greenhouse gas emissions from the U.S.
Over the next four months, NOAA scientists will launch unmanned ocean vehicles, called Saildrones, from the Arctic to the tropical Pacific Ocean to help better understand how changes in the ocean are affecting weather, climate, fisheries and marine mammals. The wind and solar-powered research vehicles that resemble a sailboat will travel thousands of miles across the ocean, reaching some areas never before surveyed with such specialized technology.
Ocean acidification is spreading rapidly in the western Arctic Ocean in both area and depth, potentially affecting shellfish, other marine species in the food web, and communities that depend on these resources, according to new research published in Nature Climate Change by NOAA, Chinese marine scientists and other partners.
Long known for weather forecasting and climate prediction, NOAA is pioneering a new type of forecasting -- fish forecasting. Meet Désirée Tommasi, Ph.D., a young oceanographer working at NOAA’s Geophysical Fluid Dynamics Laboratory in Princeton, N.J. who has just published research about forecasting the Pacific sardine, one of the nation’s most storied fish, made famous by John Steinbeck’s Cannery Row.
As scientists work to predict how climate change may affect hurricanes, droughts, floods, blizzards and other severe weather, there’s one area that’s been overlooked: mild weather. But no more.
Methane emissions from fossil fuel development around the world are up to 60 percent greater than estimated by previous studies, according to new research led by scientists from NOAA and CIRES. The study found that fossil fuel activities contribute between 132 million and 165 million tons of the 623 million tons of methane emitted by all sources every year. That’s about 20 to 25 percent of total global methane emissions, and 20 to 60 percent more than previous studies estimated.