Highlights Archive

The ocean is the flywheel that propels the climate system, storing huge amounts of heat and carbon in a vast reservoir that covers 70 percent of Earth’s surface. Measuring changes in that heat content over time has been a subject of intense...

PMEL Acoustics Program and Engineering Development Division participated as part of a memorandum of understanding between NOAA and Caladan providing subject matter expertise on pressure sensors and acoustics during the June mission in the Mariana...

Three saildrones left Alameda, California in May and have arrived at Unimak Pass in Alaska’s remote Aleutian Islands. The ocean drones have sailed nearly 2,700 miles at a walking pace, about 2.5 miles per hour (2 knots), which is just about the...

The US Arctic and Bering Sea are big, remote, and harsh environments. PMEL's Innovative Technology for Arctic Exploration program and Engineering Development Division have been developing autonomous technologies and tools to collect critical data to...

New NOAA and partner research comparing ocean acidification around North America shows that the most vulnerable coastal waters are along the northern part of the east and west coasts. While previous research has looked at specific regions, the new...

The coronavirus pandemic response has reduced pollution from a large number of sources across many geographic regions. NOAA has launched a wide-ranging research effort to investigate the impact of reduced vehicle traffic, air travel, shipping...

The main tsunami hazard for Washington State originates from a potential earthquake at the Cascadia Subduction Zone, which is stretched along the U.S. Pacific coasts offshore Washington, Oregon and Northern California. The main impact during such a...

Aerosols are fine particles that are produced by waves breaking at the ocean surface (sea spray), phytoplankton (sulfate aerosol), sandstorms (dust), and combustion (burning of fossil fuels and wildfires). These microscopic particles can impact...

Online registration for the 2020 NOAA Science Camp is now open! NOAA Science Camp is held at the NOAA Western Regional Center in Seattle, WA and exposes middle school and high school students to the various research conducted at NOAA through hands-on...

Stacy Maenner Jones has been selected February's NOAA Employee of the Month!

Stacy is a Physical Scientist at PMEL in Seattle, Washington, where she has been instrumental in the development of the moored and autonomous ocean CO2 program, and...

The northern Bering and Chukchi Seas are among the world’s most productive ocean areas. They are home to millions of seabirds and marine mammals and vibrant Indigenous cultures. The region has also long been one of the fastest warming places on the...

41 scientists from PMEL, including scientists from NOAA's cooperative institutes at the University of Washington's Joint Institute for the Study of the Ocean and Atmosphere (JISAO) and Oregon State University's Cooperative Institute for Marine...

On November 20, 2019, a team of PMEL scientists, engineers, and technicians successfully deployed two deep water oceanographic moorings off the coast of Hawaii to test PMEL’s newest data acquisition system, known as TELOS (Telemetry, Electronics &...

PMEL's Atmospheric Chemistry Group has been participating in the Atlantic Tradewind Ocean-Atmosphere Mesoscale Interaction Campaign (ATOMIC) onboard the RV Ronald H. Brown in the tropical North Atlantic east of Barbados.

The six-week scientific...

A new NOAA-funded study has documented for the first time that ocean acidification along the US Pacific Northwest coast is impacting the shells and sensory organs of some young Dungeness crab, a prized crustacean that supports the most valuable...

This past fall, NOAA PMEL's Ecosystems and Fisheries-Oceanography Coordinated Investigations (EcoFOCI) program recovered a surface mooring “Peggy” at the biophysical mooring site 2 (M2) adding a prestigious marker to this time series by providing...