This post is brought to us by Peter Mello of Sea-fever.org (via NOAA), in two seperate installments. The first post a map of Ocean Energy Distribution Map from Chile Earthquake Tsunami (shown above). Peter writes:
8.2-foot tsunami wave expected to strike Hilo, Hawaii 11:05 a.m. local time (4:05 p.m. ET) according to the Pacific Tsunami Warning Center. Tsunami advisory extended to Oregon, Washington, parts of Alaska, coastal British Colombia by West Coast Alaska Tsunami Warning Center
Steamboats at Colman Dock, Seattle, WA, circa 1912 – The Puget Sound Mosquito Fleet was a large number of private transportation companies running small passenger and freight boats around on Puget Sound, nearby waterways, and rivers. This large group of steamers and sternwheelers stopped at every waterfront dock. The historical peak of activity occurred between the first and second World Wars. Click image to see full size.
Steamer Virginia V, last of Puget Sound Mosquito Fleet – now one of the historic fleet of NW Seaport, South Lake Union Park, Seattle, Washington, USA. Listed on the National Register of Historic Places. The boat has city landmark status. Steamer Virginia V’s website »
Cade Candies – boat being built at Dakota Creek Shipyard in Anacortes for the Otto Candies company of Des Allemands, LA. – from flickr
Storm Surge and Flooding Prediction Dropped in New Scale
NOAA’s National Weather Service will use a new hurricane scale this season called the Saffir-Simpson Hurricane Wind Scale. The scale keeps the same wind speed ranges as the original Saffir-Simpson Scale for each of the five hurricane categories, but no longer ties specific storm surge and flooding effects to each category.
Herbert Saffir, a consulting engineer, and Robert Simpson, who was director of the National Hurricane Center from 1967 through 1973, developed the original scale which was a useful tool to convey the threats of tropical cyclones. Changes were made to the Saffir-Simpson Scale because storm surge values and associated flooding are dependent on a combination of the storm’s intensity, size, motion and barometric pressure, as well as the depth of the near-shore waters and local topographical features. As a result, storm surge values can be significantly outside the ranges suggested in the original scale.
For example, Hurricane Ike in 2008 was a very large storm that made landfall on the upper Texas coast as a Category 2 hurricane with a peak storm surge of 15 to 20 feet. In contrast, Hurricane Charley struck Southwest Florida in 2004 as a Category 4 hurricane, but produced a peak storm surge of just 6 to 7 feet. [Continue Reading →]
This week’s interesting ship is NOAA’s new high-tech fisheries survey vessel, Bell M. Shimada.
Bell M. Shimada’s primary mission will be to study, monitor and collect data on a wide range of sea life and ocean conditions, primarily in U.S. waters from Washington state to southern California. The ship will also observe environmental conditions, conduct habitat assessments and survey marine mammal, sea turtle and marine bird populations.
The vessel is the fourth of a new class of ships designed to meet the NOAA Fisheries Service’s specific data collection requirements and the International Council for Exploration of the Seas’ new standards for a low acoustic signature.
Launched in September 2008, the 208-ft. Bell M. Shimada was built for NOAA by VT Halter Marine Inc., in Moss Point, Miss., as part of the NOAA’s fleet replacement strategy to provide world-class platforms for U.S. scientists.
Bell M. Shimada’s state-of-the-art design allows for quieter operation and movement of the vessel through the water, giving scientists the ability to study fish and marine mammals without significantly altering their behavior. The ship’s comprehensive environmental sampling capabilities will also enable researchers to gather a broad suite of marine life data with unprecedented accuracy.
The below videos show eruptions of the West Mata volcano, the deepest erupting volcano discovered by a team of scientists funded by NOAA and the National Science Foundation in May 2009. The eruptions occurred at nearly 4,000 feet below the surface of the Pacific Ocean, in an area bounded by Fiji, Tonga and Samoa.
The video below was taken from the ROV Jason in May.
The first-ever 7,300-mile Atlantic Ocean crossing by an unmanned underwater glider is opening up a new world of ocean technology. A ceremony on Dec. 9 in Baiona, Spain, will celebrate the partnership effort among the U.S. interagency Integrated Ocean Observing System (IOOS) through Rutgers University, NOAA, Puertos Del Estado (Spanish Port Authority), the National Oceanographic Partnership Program, and other European partners.
The glider, launched off the coast of New Jersey last April, repeatedly dove to depths of up to 200 meters to collect data including temperature, salinity and density. Scientists correlate these data with those from satellite imagery and altimetry, radar systems and seafloor and buoy-mounted sensors to get a more detailed view of a particular patch of ocean in near real time. The glider’s constant motion offers a more comprehensive view of ocean conditions in time and space than the static measurements usually taken from the deck of a ship.
The glider was built with custom upgrades that allowed it to dive deeper, track battery life and minimize fouling of instruments due to marine growth. Oceanography undergraduates at Rutgers University were significantly involved in this mission as part of their education program.
Nicknamed the Scarlet Knight, the 7 foot-long, 135-pound glider traversed the ocean over 221 days. A similar attempt was made last year, but that glider was lost around the Azores.
Here’s some important information regarding the Voluntary Weather Observation program at NOAA, brought to us by our friends at AMVER.
Amver wants to pass along this information we received from our partners at NOAA.Their is a new and more streamlined E-mail address for ships to use to submit their weather observations. Please start sharing SHIPOBS@NOAA.GOV to all your ships that may be using the NOAA email process for submitting their ship observations and assist them in converting from our initial webship@inetsrv email address. This updated address allows routing redundancies to ensure receipt and processing within the NWS Telecommunication Gateway and onto the GTS.
It also allows the emailed ship observations to be shared with the USCG and the Amver program so all position reports are captured thus improving SOLAS support.
REMINDER – The observation MUST BE in the body of the email and it should be in TEXT format (NO HTML if possible – although scrubbing can occur – its just slows routing process down a bit) Ensure an equal sign (=) is affixed to the end of the message to tell the computers end of transmission.
Additional information on the Voluntary Weather Observation program and sending ship observations via email can be found here.
Senior NOAA officials today commissioned NOAA Ship Pisces, the nation’s most advanced fisheries research vessel, and dedicated a new fisheries laboratory in Pascagoula, Miss. The vessel and the NOAA laboratory will support fisheries research in the Gulf of Mexico, southeastern United States and the Caribbean.
Pisces, built by Pascagoula based VT Halter Marine, is equipped with high tech research equipment and quiet-hull technology. The vessel is so quiet and so advanced that scientists can study fish populations and collect oceanographic data with minimal impact on fish and marine mammal behavior.
The 208-ft ship is the third of four newly constructed NOAA fisheries survey vessels of the same class. Pisces is operated by the NOAA Office of Marine and Aviation Operations and is homeported in Pascagoula.
Pisces was named by a team of students from Sacred Heart School in Southaven, Miss., and christened by Dr. Annette Nevin Shelby, professor emerita at Georgetown University and wife of U.S. Sen. Richard Shelby.
The new Southeast Fisheries Science Center’s Pascagoula laboratory replaces the laboratory that was destroyed by Hurricane Katrina in 2005. At approximately 55,000 square feet, the building contains office space for 104 scientists, a library, and meeting rooms. This enables NOAA to consolidate several previously dispersed programs in the Pascagoula area including the Pascagoula Laboratory; National Seafood Inspection Laboratory; and the Documentation, Approval and Supply Services office.
While perusing the NOAA website this morning, I came across an interesting article on something we are all to familiar with here on the Central and Northern California Coast: FOG. As much as it is literally a daily part of our lives here, it never ceases to amaze me just how quickly a marine layer can roll in off the Pacific, sit in the valley’s and then just as quickly burn off in the heat of the sun.
The article looks at the phonomenon of fog, exaclty what it is costing us and what NOAA is doing to mitigate the loss of life, property and resources from this everyday occurrence. [Continue Reading →]
NOAA has completed implementation of the final phase of a nine year, $180 million contract by installing the newest generation of IBM supercomputers for weather and climate prediction. The primary system, “Stratus,” and its backup, “Cirrus,” will allow NOAA to run more complex models in an effort to improve forecast accuracy and extend watch and warning lead times for severe weather, including hurricanes, tornadoes, air quality, wildfires, floods, tsunamis and winter storms.
The new supercomputers, based on IBM Power 575 Systems, are four times faster than the previous system, with the ability to make 69.7 trillion calculations per second. Higher computation speed allows meteorologists to rapidly refine and update severe weather forecasts as dangerous weather develops and threatens U.S. communities. Billions of bytes of weather observations are fed into the system each day, including temperature, wind, precipitation, atmospheric pressure, and other oceanographic and satellite information taken from the ground, air, sea and space.
Interesting facts about Stratus:
The microprocessors inside Stratus contain 2,000 miles of copper wiring, enough to stretch from Washington, D.C. to the Grand Canyon.
It would take one person with a calculator 3 million years to tabulate the number of calculations that Stratus can perform in a single second.
Stratus would fit in half the size of a tennis court.
Stratus is 34 times more powerful than the most powerful supercomputer in existence a decade ago.
Steamer Virginia V, last of Puget Sound Mosquito Fleet – now one of the historic fleet of NW Seaport, South Lake Union Park, Seattle, Washington, USA. Listed on the National Register of Historic Places. The boat has city landmark status. 
Cade Candies – boat being built at Dakota Creek Shipyard in Anacortes for the Otto Candies company of Des Allemands, LA. – 
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