Forecasters from the National Weather Service met with Rutgers’ graduate student Casey Jones this past February to discuss career paths within their agency.  The National Weather Service is tasked with providing weather forecasts and warnings of hazardous weather for the protection of life and property to enhance of the national economy.  Casey is presently a student in the Masters of Operational Oceanography program within the Department of Marine and Coastal Sciences.  Casey met with Lead Marine Forecaster Sarah Johnson as well as Science and Operations Officer Brian Haines.  They both shared their career experiences working in the agency.  They also described entry level and internship opportunities for Casey to pursue with the Weather Service. Dr. Hugh Roarty also participated in the call and is an advisor for the current masters class of students.

High-resolution optical imaging systems are quickly becoming universal tools to characterize and quantify microbial diversity in marine ecosystems. Automated detection systems such as convolutional neural networks (CNN) are often developed to identify the immense number of images collected. The goal of our study was to develop a CNN to classify phytoplankton images collected with an Imaging FlowCytobot for the Palmer Antarctica Long-Term Ecological Research project. A medium complexity CNN was developed using a subset of manually-identified images, resulting in an overall accuracy, recall, and f1-score of 93.8%, 93.7%, and 93.7%, respectively. The f1-score dropped to 46.5% when tested on a new random subset of 10,269 images, likely due to highly imbalanced class distributions, high intraclass variance, and interclass morphological similarities of cells in naturally occurring phytoplankton assemblages. Our model was then used to predict taxonomic classifications of phytoplankton at Palmer Station, Antarctica over 2017-2018 and 2018-2019 summer field seasons. The CNN was generally able to capture important seasonal dynamics such as the shift from large centric diatoms to small pennate diatoms in both seasons, which is thought to be driven by increases in glacial meltwater from January to March. Moving forward, we hope to further increase the accuracy of our model to better characterize coastal phytoplankton communities threatened by rapidly changing environmental conditions. Full article

A new generation of autonomous underwater vehicles (AUV) could revolutionize undersea exploration and shed light on ocean warming. Some new underwater vehicles, like the Mare-IT project, are designed for industrial purposes like inspecting drilling rigs or wind turbines. The project’s two-armed underwater robot is used for complex inspection and maintenance tasks. But researchers say the more urgent need is for scientific exploration. “We need to measure the amount of heat the ocean and atmosphere is absorbing each year,” Hugh Roarty, an ocean engineer at Rutgers University and IEEE Member, told Lifewire in an email interview. “This will help provide guidance on the climate models we are using to make decisions and shape policy.” Autonomous underwater vehicles (AUVs), operated and controlled by artificial intelligence (AI) methods, inspect, maintain, and repair offshore installations under water. A consortium led by the German Research Center for Artificial Intelligence (DFKI) developed a holistic solution in the Mare-IT project to make this vision a reality: an innovative, two-armed AUV for complex inspection and maintenance tasks, embedded in a powerful IT infrastructure that enables both intuitive control and monitoring of the system and effective information flow with the plant operator. The project was funded by the German Federal Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF). To ensure the safety of offshore infrastructure such as wind turbines or oil and gas production facilities, regular inspection and maintenance is essential. However, the work carried out under water not only is complex and expensive but also involves considerable risks for the divers who perform it. Remotely operated underwater systems (ROVs) are already being used to monitor the condition of maritime assets. However, there is a tendency toward systems that remain in the water for long periods of time—so-called subsea resident AUVs—and operate there autonomously and at the same time can be remotely controlled if necessary. Full article at JPT

This week Rutgers University Center for Ocean Observing Leadership (RUCOOL) Assistant Professor Dr. Travis Miles and PhD Student Joe Gradone deployed RU36, the newest addition to our glider fleet, off St. Thomas. This glider will be measuring temperature, salinity, oxygen, and subsurface currents in the passage way between St. Thomas and St. Croix.  This effort will lead to a better understanding of the transport of heat and freshwater into the Caribbean Sea which impacts the global distribution of heat through its role as the beginning of the upper limb of the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation (AMOC).

A long-term study in the Southern Ocean reveals a correlation among warming waters, decreased sea ice and reduced abundance of Antarctic silverfish. These small fish are important prey for penguins, seals and other marine life. The study was published in the journal Communications Biology. Lead author Andrew Corso of the Virginia Institute of Marine Science says, “This is the first statistically significant relationship reported between sea ice and the long-term abundance of any Antarctic fish species. With continued regional warming, these fish could disappear from the region entirely, triggering major changes in the marine ecosystem.” Co-authors on the study are Deborah Steinberg and Eric Hilton of VIMS, along with Sharon Stammerjohn at the University of Colorado Boulder. The study is based on an analysis of more than 7,000 larval fish specimens collected over 25 years (1993–2017) as part of the NSF-funded Palmer Long-Term Ecological Research program. The Palmer LTER is an ongoing investigation of the effects of climate change on the ocean food web along the west coast of the Antarctic Peninsula. “The West Antarctic Peninsula is one of the fastest-warming areas on Earth, so studies there are important to helping us understand the ecosystem’s response to change,” says Karla Heidelberg, a program director in NSF’s Office of Polar Programs. Steinberg adds that “the study area is one of the most rapidly warming regions on Earth, with increases in air and water temperatures leading to substantial reductions in sea-ice coverage over the last half century.” From 1945 to 2009, the mean winter air temperature in the region rose by 10.8 degrees Fahrenheit (6 degrees Celsius), while the annual duration of sea ice decreased by almost two months. —  NSF Public Affairs, researchnews@nsf.gov Original Article at NSF

The Long-Term Ecological Research site at Palmer Station, Antarctica, celebrates its 30th field season this year. Thanks to this long-running research program, scientists have consistently tracked environmental changes taking place along the Antarctic Peninsula, one of the fastest-warming regions on Earth, over the past several decades. Researchers have also seen how those changes have rippled through the food web, affecting everything from microscopic ocean plants and tiny crustaceans to penguins and other seabirds and marine mammals. Data collected from the Palmer LTER helps researchers understand not only how climate change is disturbing the marine ecosystem of the Antarctic Peninsula, but also gives them an idea of what the coldest places on Earth might look like in the coming decades. “I think the LTER is going to help guide us in understanding where the polar regions of this planet are going to go,” said Oscar Schofield, an oceanographer at Rutgers University and lead Principal Investigator of the Palmer LTER. “If you didn’t have this long-term dataset, you’re not in a position to understand why the ecology changes.” Full article at The Antarctic Sun

Congratulations to RUCOOL grad student Sam Coakley on successfully completing his Masters defense entitled “The evolution of a stratified upper ocean under tropical cyclone forcing.” Sam will be moving on to work at the US Climate Variability and Predictability Program. Well done Sam, and we wish you the best of luck!