Oceanography

Changes in spring surface air temperature can vary widely and even impact socioeconomics in developing countries so it will be important to learn how to predict the variations of spring temperatures. However, the dynamics and predictability of East Asian temperatures during boreal spring are more challenging compared to those in the other seasons.  Part of the difficulty is due to the spring predictability barrier. The predictive skill based on El Niño-Southern Oscillation decreases rapidly during boreal spring. For as long as climate change has been a concern El Niño has been…

If the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), independent scientists, and fisheries experts all know a claim in an article is hopelessly flawed why would the journal Marine Policy dig in their heels, doing irreparable harm to the marine conservation they claim to care about? When expressing concern about the article, NOAA wrote, "allegations made in the paper, are absent of transparency regarding the data, and assumptions supporting them are irresponsible and call into question the authors' conclusions." The claim was that 15 percent of the US pollock entering Japan is…

Right now (3PM Central European Time), Venice is being hit by the third biggest flood in over a century - in fact I think it is the third biggest flood ever recorded. The water is predicted to surge to 1.60 meters above average sea level, which means that most of the ground in the island will be under 50 cm of water, with some parts of the town under up to 80 cm. The strongest high tide in history is the one of November 4th, 1966, with 1.94 meters above sea level. And the second one I recall happened in 1980, with 1.68 meters. In both cases the damage was very large. In the recent past…

It was one of these extremely rare days of calms seas far north in the world. When visiting the Arctic coasts of Norway, I often joke and say that the climate here is the same all year around, low temperatures, windy and in general very unpredictable weather. You can have blue skies one minute and rain pouring down almost horizontally! within the next minute. But this was not the case on this day, the 23rd July 2018. The temperature was reaching a whopping 32 Celsius and there were almost no movements of the air. In fact it was so hot, that the only livable place to be for a northerner was…

The National Nature Reserve of the French Southern and Antarctic Lands is home to the world's biggest colony of king penguins and if satellite images are being interpreted accurately, they have seen a massive 88% reduction in the size of their colony, located on Île aux Cochons, in the Îles Crozet archipelago. If so, the causes of the colony’s collapse remain a mystery but the blame will likely fall on climate change. But is it so? Known since the 1960s, the colony of king penguins (Aptenodytes patagonicus) on Île aux Cochons, in the southern Indian Ocean, has the distinction of…

At the Applied Networking Research Workshop, a meeting of the Association for Computing Machinery, the Internet Society and the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, one group claimed critical communications infrastructure, buried fiber optic cable, could be submerged by rising seas in as soon as 15 years.  They estimate that by the year 2033 more than 4,000 miles of buried fiber optic conduit will be underwater and more than 1,100 traffic hubs will be surrounded by water. The most susceptible U.S. cities are predictably New York, Miami and Seattle.  Their model…

Seabirds love fish and fishing nets are a ready source of food. Peru's gillnet fleet comprises the largest component of that nation's small-scale fleet and is conservatively estimated to set 100,000 kilometers of net per year in which thousands of turtles and seabirds die as "bycatch" or unintentionally. A new experiment in Peru showed promising results, resulting in 85 percent fewer guanay cormorants - a native diving bird that commonly becomes entangled in nets - being caught. in Sechura Bay in northern Peru, LED lights attached at regular intervals to commercial fishing gillnets…

Barometric pressure, tides, winds, waves, they all play a role in the ebb and flow of the ocean. A new study finds that that river outflow could play a role in sea level change as well.  By examining decades' worth of river level and tidal data from gauges installed throughout the eastern United States. and combining that data with information on water density, salinity, and the Earth's rotation, they created a mathematical model that describes the link between river discharge and sea level on an annual basis. Simulations are simulations, the model may or may not be realistic, but it…

The Baltic Sea is home to some of the world's largest areas of oxygen-starved waters where most marine animals can't survive - dead zones - and it has been that way for as long as records have been kept, but a new study estimates that oxygen loss in coastal areas over the past century is unprecedented in the last 1500 years. According to the researchers, human-induced pollution, from fertilizers and sewage running off the countries surrounding the Baltic into the sea, is the main driver of recent oxygen loss in the region's coastal waters. If low-oxygen areas spread it can reduce fish yields…

Ice seems solid to the eye, but it is really a material that flows like a viscous liquid. In the polar ice sheets, it flows towards the oceans under its own weight. Knowing how fast the ice flows is of crucial importance to predict future sea level rises, especially if climate change occurs and impacts that. For a new study, researchers used flow velocities at the surface of the northern Greenland Ice Sheet to create estimates and data from satellite images suggest that the polar ice is softer than scientists believed.  The flow has two components: the internal shearing flow that…