Category: ocean sensors

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The news just keeps getting worse for cold-temperature fish such as cod in the ever-warming waters of the Gulf of Maine.

A new study, conducted by National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration researchers and appearing in the Journal of Geophysical Research — Oceans, reached an ominous conclusion: The waters of the Gulf of Maine, which a previous study showed to be warming faster than 99.9 percent of the rest of the planet’s oceans, are continuing to warm at an accelerated rate and are expected to continue doing so for at least the next 80 years.

Source: Study finds Gulf of Maine warming faster than thought — Bangor Daily News Maine

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Earlier this month, meteorologist blogger Cliff Mass announced the death of the “blob” in the northeast Pacific Ocean.

The “blob” refers to the large area of very warm waters that helped set up a bulging area of high pressure over Alaska, around which the jet stream flowed, directing impressive cold over the U.S. for the past two winters and blocking storms from hitting the West Coast.

Source: The Pacific ‘blob’ loses. El Niño wins. What comes next? – The Washington Post

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An alarming new study reveals that the lakes around the world are warming. On average, freshwater lakes appear to be warming faster than the world’s oceans, according to a release from NASA.

The study has shown that the water in lakes all around the world is rapidly warming by an average 0.3 degrees Celsius each decade. While this may not seem like much, the temperature change is wreaking havoc on lake ecosystems, causing massive algal blooms and devastating fish kills.

Source: NASA: Climate change threatens to destroy the world’s lakes

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The speed of vessels operating near endangered killer whales in Washington is the most influential factor – more so than vessel size – in how much noise from the boats reaches the whales, according to a new study published today in the online journal PLOS ONE.

The new study by scientists from the University of Washington and National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) Fisheries is the first to examine how much noise from individual boats reaches the whales in the inland waters of Washington and British Columbia, where they are a popular attraction for recreational and commercial whale watching vessels.

Source: Vessel speed biggest factor in noise affecting killer whales | UW Today

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Saildrones have the capacity to increase observational infrastructure in remote and hostile polar regions where ship time and human labor is costly and potentially hazardous.

Studies of the Bering Sea and Arctic waters are conducted mostly with ships. However, shortcomings of research vessels include their cost, limited range of observations, and seasonal measurements. The use of Saildrones in colder waters could allow scientists to enhance ship time, expand their range of measurements in the ocean, and continue to monitor through the entire year. These air and water measurements can be used to better understand warming temperatures, decreasing sea ice, and ocean acidification in an area that is not only a productive ecosystem, but also a valuable fishery for salmon, king crab, and Walleye pollock.

Source: For the first time, Saildrones explore the Bering Sea

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Stanford University researchers are deploying a fleet of static buoys and Wave Glider robots to turn the waters off the coast of San Francisco into a huge WiFi network to track tagged fish and animals.

The network acts like a huge Wi-Fi system and relies on cheap, long-lasting acoustical tags. When a tagged fish passed within 1,000 feet (304.8 m) of a data receiver, the acoustic signal is recorded and uploaded along with a timestamp and GPS location to a shore station. The buoys that make up the static part of the network are placed where white sharks are most likely to be. However, it’s an axiom of science that if you already know where something is, then there’s no point in looking for it, so the network also uses Wave Glider robots to rove about the area to cover any holes.

Source: Wave Glider ocean robots to track sharks in northern California