PMEL in the News
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.
Major El Niño Study Now Underway
The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) and NASA have teamed up on a major study of El Niño. A potentially record El Niño is underway in the Pacific and has already altered weather around the world.