Tag: Oceanography

New Research Finds Climate-Critical Ocean Current System is Slowing

March 11, 2024

The global ocean has been heating up for decades, with records from the 1960s reporting a substantial rise in upper ocean heat content. Rising ocean temperatures also affect ocean currents, though there has yet to be a consensus on the strength or extent of those changes, or whether these changes will continue in the future. However, a new paper led by Earth System Science Interdisciplinary Center (ESSIC) scientist Alexey Mishonov documents, for the first time, a significant slowing of the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation (AMOC), a crucial ocean current system that plays a vital role in regulating Earth’s climate.

WOA23 annual mean sea water temperature for the 2015-2022 time period on 0.25 grid.

World Ocean Atlas 2023 Released

February 20, 2024

ESSIC/CISESS scientist Alexey Mishonov is one of the authors of the newly released World Ocean Atlas 2023. The World Ocean Atlas 2023 (WOA23) is a set of temperature, salinity, oxygen, phosphate, silicate, and nitrate means based on profile data from the World Ocean Database (WOD). WOA23 includes approximately 1.8 million new oceanographic casts added to the WOD since WOA18’s release, as well as renewed and updated quality controls. The database can be used to create boundaries and/or initial conditions for a variety of ocean models, verify numerical simulations of the ocean, and corroborate satellite data.

Figure 1: NCEI regional climatologies completed to date marked on the sea surface temperature field from World Ocean Atlas (WOA18). The abbreviations of the regional climatology names are: ARC - Arctic Regional Climatology, EAS - East Asian Seas, GINS - Greenland, Iceland, and Norwegian Seas; GOM - Gulf of Mexico version 2; NEP - Northeast Pacific, NNP - Northern North Pacific; NWA - Northwest Atlantic, and SWNA - Southwest North Atlantic.

High-Resolution Regional Ocean Climatologies with the Northwest Atlantic as an Example: A Review

February 15, 2024

ESSIC scientist Alexey Mishonov is lead author on a new paper in Journal of Marine Science Research and Oceanography titled “High-Resolution Regional Ocean Climatologies with the Northwest Atlantic as an Example: A Review”.

Figure: The within-year variation of SST, with 2023 values shown in black.

New Record Ocean Temperatures and Related Climate Indicators in 2023

January 22, 2024

ESSIC/CISESS scientist Alexey Mishonov along with other scientists from the United States, China, New Zealand and Italy have a new article in the journal Advances in Atmospheric Science documenting the record highs in the global ocean set in 2023.

A photo from the GEO Blue Planet Symposium

Digital Solutions for Sustainable Oceans: 6th GEO Blue Planet Symposium

January 8, 2024

The 6th GEO Blue Planet Symposium, organized by ESSIC/CISESS Scientist and GEO Blue Planet Executive Director Emily Smail was held from October 31 to November 2 in Seoul, Republic of Korea. The event, which brought together a global community focused on “Digital Solutions for Sustainable Oceans”, was a resounding success.

Figure: Blue crabs spend their early larval stages in off-shore water, making them vulnerable to ocean circulation and other highly variable environmental phenomena. (Graphic from Maryland Sea Grant Chesapeake Quarterly, 2012.)

ESSIC at Blue Crab Data Workshop

December 20, 2023

The Chesapeake Bay Stock Assessment Committee held a Blue Crab Data Workshop from Dec 5-7 to review sources of environmental and biological data that may help model the blue crab population for improving the management of this important marine resource and iconic Chesapeake Bay delicacy. Ron Vogel, ESSIC/CISESS senior faculty specialist, participated in the workshop as a subject matter expert on environmental data sources from satellites to be used in the modeling research.

Reporting and Sharing Data for Ocean Alkalinity Enhancement Research

November 27, 2023

ESSIC/NOAA Ocean Carbon and Acidification Data System (OCADS) Scientist Liqing Jiang led a chapter of the Guide to Best Practices in Ocean Alkalinity Enhancement Research, a

Global surface ocean pH on total scale in 2020. Modified from Jiang et al. (2023).

Acidification of the Global Surface Ocean: What We Have Learned from Observations

November 20, 2023

Global surface ocean pH on total scale in 2020. Modified from Jiang et al. (2023). ESSIC Scientist Liqing Jiang is a co-author on a new

Updated High-Resolution Northern North Pacific Regional Climatology Released

November 17, 2023

On November 7th, ESSIC/CISESS Scientist Alexey Mishonov and the National Centers for Environmental Information (NCEI) released the Northern North Pacific regional climatology, version 2. This is a collection of high-resolution quality-controlled temperature and salinity fields retrieved from the latest World Ocean Database (WOD23) on standard depth levels from the sea surface to 5,200 m depth covering the period from 1955 to 2022.

Summer 2023 water temperature anomaly map for Chesapeake Bay shows a 1 degree C decrease in temperature compared to a 2007-2022 baseline, indicating favorable conditions for several key fish species, according to the seasonal fishery impacts report released by the NOAA Chesapeake Bay Office and containing data generated by UMD/ESSIC/CISESS.

Chesapeake Bay has ‘favorable’ summer, finds ESSIC-supported NOAA report

November 9, 2023

The Virginian-Pilot featured a news article on November 5 highlighting a NOAA report containing an operational satellite data product from ESSIC/CISESS Senior Faculty Specialist Ron Vogel. The report, Synthesis of Environmental Impacts on Key Fishery Resources in the Chesapeake Bay, is released seasonally by the NOAA Chesapeake Bay Office and is used by regional fishery managers to help guide management decisions.