The agreement with Middlesex County Parks for the operation of a High Frequency radar system at Old Bridge Waterfront Park was renewed for another three years.  The radar has been in operation since 2015 and collects surface currents in Raritan Bay on an hourly basis.  Rutgers would like to thank Mr. Eric Gehring , Open Space Coordinator with the Office of Parks and Recreation for his help with the agreement and his continued partnership with the RUCOOL mission.

Mr. Jeff Frank returned to Rutgers this week to deliver four surface drifters that were constructed by students at the Career and Academic Development Institute of Philadelphia, PA.  The drifters are part of the Student Drifter Program and was sponsored through a grant by the Toshiba STEM grant program. Jeff delivered his first drifter to Rutgers in 2019 which was deployed in Raritan Bay.  That drifter was battery powered and transmitted data over a 1,400 km journey.  The new drifters are solar powered so hopefully they will provide even more data than the first drifter. Student Drifters is as an educational program for formal and informal learning. Educators can address multiple disciplines including Science, Technology, Engineering, and Math (STEM), and customize their lesson plans with existing resources from simple concepts of latitude and longitude to complex studies of dispersion.

This year High Frequency Radar was accepted as one of the networks within the Global Ocean Observing System (GOOS). The network was accepted along with Ocean Gliders and Animal Borne Ocean Sensors. GOOS is an international framework and network of organizations that work together to collect, integrate, and share oceanographic data on a global scale. It was established by the Intergovernmental Oceanographic Commission (IOC) of UNESCO in 1991. Dr. Hugh Roarty shared results from the Global High Frequency Radar Network at the 14th Observations Coordination Group Meeting in Cape Town South Africa June 6-8, 2023.  The Observations Coordination Group (OCG) works to guide and strengthen the implementation of the GOOS and World Meteorological Organization Integrated Global Observing System (WIGOS) through identifying, coordinating and developing relevant initiatives across the global ocean observing networks.

Lessons learned from ocean observations during hurricanes Irene and Sandy pushed the U.S. to deploy a fleet of underwater robots during every hurricane season. As extreme weather events are becoming more frequent due to climate change, is it time to expand this hurricane forecasting capacity to other regions? 11 years after Hurricane Sandy hit the Caribbean islands and the East Coast of the United States in 2012, its destructive power is undoubtedly still vivid in the memories of its witnesses. The largest Atlantic hurricane on record, Sandy killed 233 people across the Caribbean and North America, and brought destruction with extreme winds, mudslides and flooding that inflicted almost US $70 billion in damage. “Just one year before that, we had Hurricane Irene, which was supposed to be a devastating storm – but then it kind of fizzled out. The next year, when alerts about Hurricane Sandy came up, people remembered Irene, and it was really difficult to convince anyone that this time it was going to be much bigger,” Dr Scott Glenn, distinguished professor at Rutgers University shares his memories. What he knew that the weather forecasters did not, was the alarming conditions below the ocean surface that warned the hurricane would be extremely powerful. “When hurricanes Irene and Sandy hit, we had our underwater gliders – autonomous underwater vehicles that collect ocean observations, and they were deployed during both of these events. And right before Irene arrived, we saw the ocean cool very rapidly,” says Dr Glenn. “This cooling just pulled the energy out of the storm and rapidly weakened it. But there was no such cooling before Sandy, and so the heat would only fuel the storm.” The ocean controls our planet’s water cycle, and even small changes within it can have a big impact on weather events on land. Such different ocean conditions observed before Hurricane Sandy raised serious concerns between scientists, including Dr Glenn himself, who quickly understood that this time the hurricane was not going to show any mercy. But surprising though it may seem today, 11 years ago weather forecasts were not automatically absorbing ocean data into their models. “I had this data from the gliders in the ocean, but at that time there was no way for me to communicate this. There was no way to add it to the information stream that reaches the forecasters,” he says. Since then, Dr Glenn and other oceanographers have worked hard to raise the importance of ocean observations in extreme event forecasting and to develop an operational system for data collection in the path of storms. Today the U.S. boasts a full hurricane glider fleet deployed during every hurricane season. These sturdy underwater robots can withstand destructive weather conditions in order to collect and transmit near real-time ocean data into the U.S. Integrated Ocean Observing System (IOOS), a part of the Global Ocean Observing System (GOOS). Since 2018, this data is included into hurricane forecast models, contributing to timely and more accurate warnings. Full article at GOOS

This summer Rutgers will mark the 23rd year of measuring the surface currents off New Jersey. The measurements were started at three locations Sandy Hook, Loveladies and Wildwood. The surface currents are measured using High Frequency Radar, a remote sensing instrument that can measure currents over the horizon. The instruments are manufactured by CODAR Ocean Sensors, a partner with Rutgers since 1998.

At Rutgers, a committee of faculty, students and staff helped create a divestment policy that put an end to all investments in fossil fuels, moved those investments to environmentally friendly index funds which actively seek investments in renewable energy. “If we don’t do this work for the future that we’re not going to see, the one thing we know is the future will be worse. We know that. So, if we know that, don’t we have an obligation to do something about it? I think we do,” Holloway said. Full article at CBSNews

On May 10th, Rutgers President Jonathan Holloway presented RUCOOL’s Grace K. Saba with the “The Faculty Scholar-Teacher Award.” “Each year these awards honor members of the Rutgers community selected by their colleagues for outstanding contributions to teaching, research, and public service . . . I hope you share our pride in and congratulations for this year’s honorees,” Holloway wrote. According to the university, “The award honors tenured faculty members who have made outstanding synergistic contributions in research and teaching. This award recognizes those who make visible the vital link between teaching and scholarship by contributing to the scholarship of teaching and by bringing together scholarly and classroom activities.” Saba initiates diverse, multidisciplinary projects in order to address both small-scale (individual organism) and large-scale (whole ecosystem) questions with ecological, physiological, and biogeochemical implications. Her broad research interests are in the fields of coastal marine organismal ecology and physiology, with emphasis on how organisms interact with their environment (physical-biological coupling) and other organisms (food web dynamics and predator-prey interactions), how physiological processes impact biogeochemistry (nutrient cycling and carbon sequestration), and how climate change (i.e., ocean acidification, warming) impacts these processes. She applies multiple techniques and collaborates with physical/biological/chemical oceanographers and physiologists, molecular ecologists, fisheries scientists, ocean observers, and climate modelers. She employs an integrative, mechanistic approach and has strong laboratory and field components in her research.