What's New
Acoustic Doppler Current Profiler (ADCP) subsurface mooring being deployed in the Bering Sea from the NOAA Ship Oscar Dyson.
This weekend, the EcoFOCI program completed its eleventh and final research cruise of its field season on the F/V Aquila to maintain and enhance an innovative array of biophysical moorings in conjunction with annual ship-based hydrographic data in the Bering Sea.
The team recovered 14 and deployed 10 moorings, including swapping the M2-site surface mooring for a sub-surface mooring to prevent damage from the ice to ensure 25 years of nearly continuous data. Scientists from PMEL, NOAA Fisheries Alaska Science Center and University of New Hampshire also collected some measurements from a CTD (conductivity-temperature-depth), nutrients, oxygen, plankton and larval fish along the Distributed Biological Observatory (DBO) Line 1, which has only been sampled once in 2017. These DBO lines are designated “hot spots” centered on locations of high productivity, biodiversity and rates of biological change in the Bering, Chukchi, and Beaufort seas.
Results from these observations and experiments will help describe important ecosystem linkages among climate, plankton, fishes, birds and mammals. Continuous monitoring from this region provides critical data to support sustainable management of living resources in the Bering Sea.
The EcoFOCI program is a collaborative research effort by scientists at the Pacific Marine Environmental Lab (PMEL) and Alaska Fisheries Science Center (AFSC) focusing on the unique and economically important high-latitude ecosystems of Alaska.
PMEL in the News
Pacific Ocean temperatures are rising along the equator, a signal that winter likely will be warmer than normal in the Northwest. Federal climatologists peg the odds that an El Nino will form in the next couple of months at 70 to 75 percent, a 5 percent increase since mid-September. The warm...
El Nino winters often bring warmer than normal temperatures and below normal snowfall. That would mean warmer and drier temperatures for the months of December, January and February in the Inland Northwest. Nick Bond is mentioned.
Glenn Farley interviews Washington State Climatologist Nick Bond of the University of Washington. We had a preview of what climate change could look like here during a period of "the blob."
Feature Publication
Ocean temperature anomalies. (a) Near-global integrals of ocean temperature anomalies relative to the record-length average seasonal cycle updated from Roemmich and Gilson (2009). (b) Linear trend of temperature anomalies (orange line), and trend with a Niño3.4 regression removed (blue line) following Johnson and Birnbaum (2017).
NOAA has led, for 28 years, a team of international scientists in issuing annual reports on the state of the climate focusing on the year just passed. The State of the Climate in 2017 report was published as a supplement to Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society in August 2018. Nine Federal, JISAO (Joint Institute for the Study of the Atmosphere and Ocean, University of Washington),... more