PMEL in the News
Environmental Outlook: Concerns About The Unique Warming Trends In The Pacific Ocean
Above-average temperatures are being recorded across the Pacific Ocean. Scientists say climate change is likely partly to blame. Yet researchers are still figuring how warming trends unique to this body of water are interacting. The current El Nino could be one of the strongest ever recorded. And scientists say a decades-long cycle of heating and cooling, could be switching to a warming phase. Other climatologists are monitoring a strange zone of warm water off of North America. For this month’s Environmental Outlook: Guest host Indira Lakshmanan talks with a panel of guests about warming in the Pacific Ocean and effects on weather patterns and marine life.
19th Century Whaling Logs A Boon To Climate Scientists
Whaling was a booming business in the 1800s. By some estimates, the dangerous trade was more lucrative than the gold rush. Today, the most valuable harvest from the whaling years might be the ship’s logbooks.
A team of scientists from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, the University of Washington and the U.K. Meteorological Office’s Hadley Centre are enlisting 22,000 volunteers from around the world to comb through hundreds of thousands of pages of old ships’ logs.
What Do Long-Dead Whalers Have To Do With Climate Change?
When the steamship Belvedere left San Francisco in the spring of 1897, its crew members couldn’t have known what a treacherous voyage awaited them.
Their life-and-death experiences would all be captured in the ship’s log, which started out with this unassuming entry:
Cutbacks in Japan Mean Fewer El Nino-Watching Buoys in Pacific
The lens the world uses to watch for El Ninos has become a bit fuzzier after Japan cut by about half the number of buoys in the western Pacific that monitor changes in the ocean. It will take another four to five offline next year.
BBC Discovery - El Nino
Floods in South America, fires in Indonesia, famine threatened in Ethiopia, yet more drought in Southern Africa and central America. Plus, a stunning peak in global temperatures for 2015. The current El Nino, just past its peak, has a lot to answer for. Roland Pease talks to the experts.