The Global Ocean Monitoring and Observing Program (GOMO) received funding through the Disaster Relief Supplemental Appropriations Act to support a focused ocean-atmosphere observing experiment during the 2023 hurricane season. This research experiment, called the Coordinated Hurricane Atmosphere-Ocean Sampling (CHAOS) is an integrated field campaign led by GOMO’s new Extreme Events Program and conducted as part of NOAA’s Atlantic Oceanographic and Meteorological Laboratory’s long standing Hurricane Field Program. The goal of CHAOS is to improve our understanding of the role of the ocean, waves, and air-sea interactions in the development and intensification of hurricanes in order to produce more accurate and reliable models and forecasts. To support the development of early career scientists and researchers, GOMO prioritized funding projects co-led by early career scientists, investigators and collaborators. Early career ocean professionals are defined as people who are current graduate students, postdoctoral researchers, or within 10 years since the completion of their highest graduate degree. Read more about the early career researchers involved in this collaborative effort below! Original article at NOAA Global Ocean Monitoring & Observing

🏆 John P. Craven Mentor Award The John P. Craven Mentor Award is presented to any established MTS Mentor invoking the long and impactful career of John Pina Craven, this award is conferred upon an MTS member who has demonstrated outstanding and sustained service to the field of marine technology through mentorship. Dr. Grace Saba Grace Saba is an Associate Professor at Rutgers University who leads a research group within the Department of Marine and Coastal Sciences (DMCS) and serves as faculty in the Center for Ocean Observing Leadership (RUCOOL). She teaches multiple courses at Rutgers, and mentors the independent research of graduate and undergraduate students and post-docs. Her research group utilizes laboratory experiments, field research, and ocean observation to investigate how seawater conditions, including environmental stressors such as warming temperature and ocean acidification, affect the ecology, physiology, distribution, and phenology of coastal marine zooplankton and fishes. Grace co-founded the Mid-Atlantic Coastal Acidification Network (MACAN), serves on the MACAN Steering Committee and Science Working Group, and has been working with the State of New Jersey toward a developing Statewide Ocean Acidification Monitoring Network and more broadly their Ocean Acidification Action Plan. She co-leads the Ocean Health and Ecosystems Task Team for OceanGliders and serves as a member of the Habitat & Ecosystem Subcommittee for the Regional Wildlife Science Collaborative for Offshore Wind.

Gov. Kathy Hochul suspended swimming at three Long Island state beaches as rough surf and rip tides and flooding as the effects of faraway storms continue to hit the region. New York City officials also issued a coastal flood advisory and warned that life-threatening rip currents could be present through Thursday. The Parks Department advised against swimming in areas without lifeguards, but an agency spokesperson said late Wednesday afternoon that city beaches would remain open to swimming. “We are continuing to monitor the forecast and currents, and will take appropriate action as necessary,” NYC Parks senior press officer Dan Kastanis said via email. But weather officials said they were hopeful the waters will calm in time for Labor Day weekend. The choppy waves are due to hurricanes Franklin and Idalia — even though neither storm is due to come within 500 miles of New York waterways. Franklin rapidly intensified into a Category 4 hurricane on Monday, as the cyclone churned its way from the tropics into the North Atlantic. Hurricane Idalia trailed not too far behind, making landfall as a Category 3 on Florida’s panhandle Wednesday morning. It’s due to travel through The South and then exit due east over the Carolinas. Despite their distance, both storms are creating swell waves — giant rolling masses of water that can travel long distances. Josh Kohut, a Rutgers University professor who studies physical oceanography, said these swells tend to get measured in two ways. First, there is the height or amplitude — the distance between the trough of the wave and its crest. The closer you are to the center of the storm, the higher the waves are going to be. “The other measure we take is the wave period. That’s how much time it takes to go from one crest to the next crest,” Kohut said. Swells tend to have longer periods — meaning more time passes before each one hits shore. Kohut said if beachgoers sit in the sand and count 10 seconds or more between the arriving waves, then they are witnessing swells. Smaller waves generated locally by the breeze tend to arrive about five seconds apart. Full article at Gothamist Photo credit: Michael M. Santiago/Getty Images

Twenty STEM interested high school students joined Rutgers scientists Hugh Roarty, Rick Lathrop, Kendall Eldridge and Lucas Marxen in examining the effectiveness of prescribed fire to attain increase the biodiversity in the meadows and woodlands of the Rutgers Ecological Preserve and Natural Teaching Area, a 400-acre tract on the Livingston Campus of Rutgers University. Prescribed fire, or the controlled application of fire by experts, is increasingly used across New Jersey as a management technique to maintain and increase the species diversity in meadows and to control exotic invasive species in woodlands. Over two Saturday programs, NJ high school students worked with Dr. Hugh Roarty to use a drone to collect post-burn imagery and with Kendall Eldridge , Dr. Rick Lathrop, and Lucas Marxen to use GIS technology to make maps that will geolocate the plots and allow us to compare the field collected data with the pre-vs. post-burn imagery. The ultimate goal was to document the short-term effects of prescribed fire on the Eco Preserve’s meadows and woodlands and develop a plan to plant native plants to increase habitat for pollinators. Students were challenged to share what they have learned in their communities.  Shreya Dutt, a high school student in East Brunswick, developed this video for use in her local library and as part of her YouTube channel – https://youtu.be/mCWmSLGPz5w. This program was sponsored by NJ Space Grant and supported by 4-H Youth Development, the Center for Remote Sensing Spatial Analysis, and the Department of Marine & Coastal Sciences.

The 2023-2024 class of the Masters in Operational Oceanography program just completed the High Frequency Radar module of their Field Lab Methods course.  The week covered an introduction to oceanographic measurements with High Frequency radar and an overview of ocean observing for New Jersey and the Mid Atlantic.  The students made a field trip to the radar stations in Bradley Beach and Sea Bright, NJ.  Guest speakers for the course included Dr. Brian Emery from University of California Santa Barbara and Mr. Chad Whelan CEO of CODAR Ocean Sensors.  Thanks to Mr. Ethan Handel and Mr. Tim Stolarz who helped provide content to the course.

During the winter, sea ice that is essential to the marine food web usually grows around Antarctica. Warming temperatures are slowing that growth. By Kristin Toussaint4 minute Read It’s currently winter in Antarctica, but that doesn’t mean the polar region is exempt from the extreme temperatures that are scorching the world. While normally the ocean around Antarctica freezes in the winter, growing sea ice that is essential to the marine food web, this year that ice isn’t growing as usual. “What we’re seeing this year we’ve never seen before,” says Oscar Schofield, chair of the Marine Science Program at Rutgers University and one of the principal investigators for Palmer LTER, a Long Term Ecological Research site on Antarctica. “Unless something dramatic happens in late winter, which I’m not expecting, this will be the lowest year ever recorded for sea ice.” Sea ice grows throughout the winter, historically reaching its peak in September at about 19 million square kilometers, or 7 million square miles. (North America, for comparison, is about 9.5 million square miles.) But the ice isn’t growing to that level this year. The decline is so extreme that researchers have been calling it a “five-sigma event,” basically referring to how many standard deviations it is beyond the mean: “It’s like, okay, we’re five times outside of deviations,” Schofield says, “so it’s an extreme event.” As of June 27, Antarctic sea ice measured 1.6 million square kilometers (618,000 square miles) below the previous record low for that date set in 2022, according to the National Snow & Ice Data Center—and more than 2.6 million square kilometers (1 million square miles) below the 1981 to 2010 average. Before 2015, some areas around Antarctica would see large declines in sea ice, but other areas were still growing more, so it essentially balanced out. Since 2016 there’s been a “hemispheric decline” in the amount of sea ice year to year. “But this year is particularly stunning in how little sea ice has formed around the continent,” Schofield says. The trend has big implications for the planet. Antarctica is already warming faster than the rest of the world, with the Antarctic Peninsula in particular warming five times faster than the global average. The ocean also takes in a lot of the atmospheric carbon that we produce, and the Southern Ocean, also known as the Antarctic Ocean, is responsible for 30% to 40% of that. ​“If you change the state of the Southern Ocean, there’s great potential for it to have big ramifications on planetary carbon, biogeochemistry, and all those kinds of things,” Schofield says. “There are a lot of discussions going on now about, what does a super-low-sea-ice year like this mean?” There are also questions about what the decline means for the Antarctic life that has evolved around sea ice. In the winter, Antarctic winds increase, which can mix up the ocean water. Sea ice provides a substrate, or “tabletop,” Schofield says, that protects the surface of the ocean. The upper ocean is important for plants that need to catch sunlight, and in years after there’s been a lot of sea ice, researchers tend to see big blooms of plankton in the spring—which then feed krill, ensuring there’s krill to feed whales, penguins, fish, and so on. “One prediction might be that with no sea ice, plankton blooms are smaller, and then we see that ripple up through the food web,” Schofield says. His research team is just starting to gear up for its field work, which begins in October and includes research cruises in January, so he’s not quite sure what the impact of this low-sea-ice winter will be down the line. “Is this going to be one of those years where the system fundamentally flips to be in a new state? We don’t know the answer,” he says. “But we do know that this [extreme] level is going to be sort of a prime experiment in terms of what future Antarctic ecosystems might look like.” Ecosystems could also be affected by warming water, and less sea ice means the ocean absorbs more warmth from the sun. (White ice reflects the sun, but the blue of the ocean absorbs heat from sunlight.) “Once it starts to run away it becomes worse,” says David Holland, a professor of mathematics and climate science at New York University who studies both the Arctic and Antarctic. “When summer comes to polar regions, it’s 24 /7 sunlight . . . and so you just get this really big impact. . . . Not having ice means sunlight is absorbed really efficiently by the blue ocean.” Less sea ice doesn’t change the sea level, though, since sea ice often melts and re-forms—but it can cause the planet to warm faster than current models show, Holland adds. And if that warm ocean starts to melt the continent of Antarctica and its thick, miles-deep ice, that means sea levels could rise. These trends certainly stem from human-induced climate change and higher levels of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, but natural climate cycles like El Niño can magnify the effects of climate change. Essentially, a lot of things are happening to the planet at once—but the lack of sea ice and the condition of the Antarctic is extreme. “It’s absolutely mind-boggling,” Holland says. “It’s such a massive change.” Original article at Fast Company Photo credit; Sebnem Coskun/Anadolu Agency/Getty Images

Ocean Glider RU29, belonging to Rutgers University, is stationed in the passage between St. Lucia and Martinique awaiting the arrival of Tropical Storm Bret. The glider has been carrying out a mission to improve ocean models for hurricane forecasting and study heat and fresh water transport in the region around the Windward Islands. It is part of the International Challenger Glider Mission sponsored by the G. Unger Vetlesen Foundation with ocean scientists from Rutgers University and the University of the Virgin Islands. The glider was launched off Martinique on May 30 by collaborators at the French Office of Biodiversity and the Parc Naturel Marin de Martinique and has been collecting data under Marine Science Research agreements in Martinique, Dominica, St. Lucia, and St. Vincent. The glider collects up to eight 1000-meter-deep profiles of ocean Temperature, Salinity, and Dissolved Oxygen concentration daily, and transmits them via satellite to the World Meteorological Organization’s Global Telecommunications System, where they can be immediately assimilated into the ocean models used in making hurricane forecasts. The upper ocean temperature and salinity structure and ocean heat content are all major factors in hurricane intensification, and having up-to-date measurements of them along a storm’s path is extremely valuable to accurate forecasts. These missions and their contribution to regional safety are possible through the cooperation of all the nations providing scientific research clearances for ac<vi<es like these. This mission is scheduled to continue through 26 June, and will be followed by another later in the 2023 hurricane season. Additional 2023 hurricane glider observations in the western Atlantic and Caribbean region will be supported by US NOAA and partners. Several regional projects supported by the UN Decade of Ocean Science for Sustainable Development are developing plans for operational glider measurements throughout the region.