Hurricane Irene, a stark reminder that tropical systems can affect the Northeast and of the threat of inland flooding. Image: NOAA

Conditions in the atmosphere and the ocean favor a near-normal hurricane season in the Atlantic Basin this season, NOAA announced today from Miami at its Atlantic Oceanographic and Meteorological Laboratory, and home to the Hurricane Research Division.

For the entire six-month season, which begins June 1, NOAA’s Climate Prediction Center says there’s a 70 percent chance of nine to 15 named storms (with top winds of 39 mph or higher), of which four to eight will strengthen to a hurricane (with top winds of 74 mph or higher) and of those one to three will become major hurricanes (with top winds of 111 mph or higher, ranking Category 3, 4 or 5). Based on the period 1981-2010, an average season produces 12 named storms with six hurricanes, including three major hurricanes.

“NOAA’s outlook predicts a less active season compared to recent years,” said NOAA Administrator Jane Lubchenco, Ph.D. “But regardless of the outlook, it’s vital for anyone living or vacationing in hurricane-prone locations to be prepared. We have a stark reminder this year with the 20th anniversary of Hurricane Andrew.” Andrew, the Category 5 hurricane that devastated South Florida on August 24, 1992, was the first storm in a late-starting season that produced only six named storms.

Favoring storm development in 2012: the continuation of the overall conditions associated with the Atlantic high-activity era that began in 1995, in addition to near-average sea surface temperatures across much of the tropical Atlantic Ocean and Caribbean Sea, known as the Main Development Region. Two factors now in place that can limit storm development, if they persist, are: strong wind shear, which is hostile to hurricane formation in the Main Development Region, and cooler sea surface temperatures in the far eastern Atlantic.

“Another potentially competing climate factor would be El Niño if it develops by late summer to early fall. In that case, conditions could be less conducive for hurricane formation and intensification during the peak months (August-October) of the season, possibly shifting the activity toward the lower end of the predicted range,” said Gerry Bell, Ph.D., lead seasonal hurricane forecaster at NOAA’s Climate Prediction Center.

“NOAA’s improvement in monitoring and predicting hurricanes has been remarkable over the decades since Andrew, in large part because of our sustained commitment to research and better technology. But more work remains to unlock the secrets of hurricanes, especially in the area of rapid intensification and weakening of storms,” said Lubchenco. “We’re stepping up to meet this challenge through our Hurricane Forecast Improvement Project, which has already demonstrated exciting early progress toward improving storm intensity forecasts.”

Lubchenco added that more accurate forecasts about a storm’s intensity at landfall and extending the forecast period beyond five days will help America become a more Weather-Ready Nation.

In a more immediate example of research supporting hurricane forecasting, NOAA this season is introducing enhancements to two of the computer models available to hurricane forecasters – the Hurricane Weather Research and Forecasting (HWRF) and the Geophysical Fluid Dynamics Laboratory (GFDL) models. The HWRF model has been upgraded with a higher resolution and improved atmospheric physics. This latest version has demonstrated a 20 to 25 percent improvement in track forecasts and a 15 percent improvement in intensity forecasts relative to the previous version while also showing improvement in the representation of storm structure and size. Improvements to the GFDL model for 2012 include physics upgrades that are expected to reduce or eliminate a high bias in the model’s intensity forecasts.

The seasonal outlook does not predict how many storms will hit land. Forecasts for individual storms and their impacts are provided by NOAA’s National Hurricane Center, which continuously monitors the tropics for storm development and tracking throughout the season using an array of tools including satellites, advance computer modeling, hurricane hunter aircraft, and land- and ocean-based observations sources such as radars and buoys.

Next week, May 27- June 2, is national Hurricane Preparedness Week. To help prepare residents of hurricane-prone areas, video and audio public service announcements featuring NOAA hurricane experts and the FEMA administrator are available in both English and Spanish.

“Every hurricane season we ask families, communities, and businesses to ensure they are prepared and visit www.ready.gov/hurricanes,” said Tim Manning, FEMA deputy administrator for protection and national preparedness. “Being prepared includes developing a family emergency plan, putting an emergency kit together or updating your existing kit, keeping important papers and valuables in a safe place, and getting involved to ensure your community is ready.”

NOAA’s outlook for the Eastern Pacific basin is for a near-normal hurricane season and the Central Pacific basin is expected to have a below-normal season. NOAA will issue an updated seasonal outlook for the Atlantic hurricane season in early August, just prior to the historical peak of the season.

[Source: NOAA]

Video courtesy of NOAA Okeanos Explorer Program

In crystal clear high definition video, NOAA’s Little Hercules remotely operated vehicle (ROV) flies over the remnants of a copper-sheathed sailing ship that disappeared at some point in the early to mid-19th century.

The video footage was captured on April 26, 2012 from the NOAA Ship Okeanos Explorer during the Gulf of Mexico Expedition 2012. The dive was conducted at site 15577 – a recently mapped but never-before seen shipwreck in the western Gulf of Mexico.  While most of the wood has since disintegrated, the oxidized copper sheathing remained along with a variety of artifacts. These included plates, glass bottles, guns, cannons, the ship’s stove, navigational instruments, and anchors.

A few days before discovering this wreck, the Okeanos Explorer filmed some incredible geologic features from the bottom of the Gulf of Mexico including rivers and pools of brine, salt “volcanoes”, and natural seepage of oil from the sea floor.

Click here to view the embedded video.

These features contribute to a highly unique biodiversity that ultimately exist via a chemosynthesis-based food chain and the chemicals seeping from the earth.

The following is the dive report from the Okeanos Explorer:

During yesterday’s dive, we searched for natural hydrocarbon seeps — areas where oil and natural gas slowly leak out of the seafloor.  This is an entirely natural phenomenon and an important characteristic of the Gulf of Mexico ecosystem. Just as oil and gas provide energy to power our modern society, these chemicals provide energy to support dense animal communities. Although seeps account for a much smaller area of the seafloor than the completely flat mud bottom that characterizes the majority of the Gulf, they are still quite common and contain an astounding density of life within a relatively small area. Because of the patchy distribution of hydrocarbon seepage, seep communities have been described as ‘oases’ of primary productivity in an otherwise food-poor deep sea. However, the degree to which seep communities represent isolated ‘islands’ having very little interaction with one another and the rest of the Gulf of Mexico ecosystem is unknown. Thus, studying the interactions among animals within seep ecosystems, especially food web interactions, is important to the understanding of the function of seep ecosystems and how they fit into the broader Gulf of Mexico ecosystem.

A chimera fish and golden crab (Chaceon sp.) near a clump of seep mussels. These animals spend much of their lives wandering the barren mud bottom of the Gulf of Mexico, but occasionally visit seeps. They could be important agents in transferring energy from seeps to the greater Gulf of Mexico food web. Image courtesy of the NOAA Okeanos Explorer Program.

Vestimentiferan tubeworms and bathymodiolin mussels dominate biomass in seep communities. These animals have symbiotic bacteria living inside their bodies. Through chemosynthesis, the bacteria harness energy from the chemicals in seeping fluid to produce food for their host, much like plants harness the sun’s energy to produce food via photosynthesis. These animals, in turn, provide habitat for an entire community of smaller animals, including shrimp, squat lobsters, brittle stars, anemones, and polychaete worms. Interestingly, there is no evidence that any of these animals are actually eating the mussels or tubeworms. Instead, the associated animals get their energy from free-living bacteria that harness chemical energy in the same way as the symbiotic bacteria.

Recently, scientists collected whole aggregations of tubeworms and mussels, and their associated communities. This study showed that most of these smaller animals feed within a single mussel or tubeworm aggregation (as opposed to jumping tens to hundreds of meters from one to another).  This supports the ‘oasis’ or ‘island’ analogy — at least for those animals that spend most of their lives at seeps.  There are still some missing links that would help complete the picture of how energy is transferred from bacterial primary production through the seep food web and beyond.

One link is meiofauna – very small, sometimes microscopic animals such as nematodes and copepods (figure 1). These tiny creatures are likely to be an important link in the transfer of energy from chemosynthetic microbes to higher predators.  Another is the export of seep primary production to the surrounding deep-sea ecosystem.  It is not uncommon to see fish and larger benthic (bottom dwelling) crabs “visiting” (figure 2). These animals spend most of their lives away from seeps, but may feed on seep-associated animals before moving on. It is hard to measure how much energy leaves the seep ecosystem, because fish and large crabs are less common in these habitats than the resident animals and are difficult to capture. Additionally, seep nutrition may make up a very small amount of the diet of one individual fish, so that it is difficult to detect. However, many fish, each carrying away a small amount of seep material, could be quite significant in transferring energy from seeps into the greater Gulf of Mexico food web.

In March, Shell took delivery of the M/V Aiviq, a 360-foot ice class anchor handler built by Edison Chouest Offshore. The vessel will support Shell's Arctic exploration program and is being touted as one of the most technically advanced polar-class vessels in the world.

Royal Dutch Shell is one step closure to drilling in the Arctic this summer after securing a permit from the National Marine Fisheries Service, proving to federal regulators that its operations will not harm whales and seals.

The permit, known as an “incidental harassment authorization”, was announced Wednesday by Shell and NOAA’s Fisheries Service and are required before Shell can begin begin exploratory drilling in the Chukchi and Beaufort seas this summer. The permit was granted based on the conditions that Shell can abide by specified measures to protect marine mammals and the subsistence interests of Alaskan Natives.

“We’re issuing these authorizations to Shell after conducting extensive scientific review and considering public comments,” said Sam Rauch, acting assistant administrator of NOAA’s Fisheries Service. “Shell will be required to put in place a number of mitigation measures that reduce or eliminate direct impacts to these animals and any negative effects on the ability of Alaskan Natives to conduct subsistence hunts for marine mammals.”

The permit requires that Shell must use trained observers to monitor and record animal behavior, lower ship speeds when marine mammals are known to be present, communicate with natives about exploratory activities and vessel routes, and promise to suspend operations where and when natives are hunting.

Shell efforts to start drilling in the arctic have met tough opposition from both environmentalists and the U.S. regulators.  Shell still needs to obtain approvals from the Interior Department and Fish and Wildlife Service before it gets the go-ahead to begin operations this summer.

Potential oil producing areas in the North Cuban Basin. (U.S. Geological Survey)

By Doug Helton, National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA)

For the past year, we at NOAA and the U.S. Coast Guard have been studying the possible threats that new offshore oil drilling activity near the Florida Straits and the Bahamas pose to Florida.

For example, the proximity of Cuba’s oil fields to U.S. waters has raised a lot of concerns about what would happen if a spill like the 2010 Deepwater Horizon/BP oil well blowout happened. If a large oil spill did occur in the waters northwest of Cuba, currents in the Florida Straits could carry the oil to U.S. waters and coastal areas in Florida. However, a number of factors, like winds or currents, would determine where any oil slicks might go.

NOAA’s National Ocean Service has more information about how we’re preparing for worst-case scenarios there:

The study focuses on modeling the movement of oil in water to predict where, when, and how oil might reach U.S. shores given a spill in this region of the ocean.

Models help to determine the threat to our coasts from a potential spill by accounting for many different variables, such as the weathering processes of evaporation, dispersion, photo-oxidation, and biodegradation – all of which reduce the amount of oil in the water over time.

Currents and winds also play a role in determining where oil will move in water. For example, there are three major currents that would dominate movement of spilled oil near the Florida Straits: Loop Current, Florida Current, and the Gulf Stream.

A diver explores coral in the Florida Keys National Marine Sanctuary. (NOAA)

If oil did reach U.S. waters, marine and coastal resources in southern Florida could be at risk, including coral reefs and the Florida Keys National Marine Sanctuary, located north of the Cuban drilling sites.

We’ll be watching the drilling activity there very carefully. If a spill does happen, NOAA will be ready to share our scientific expertise on oil spill response with the U.S. Coast Guard.

Doug Helton is the Incident Operations Coordinator for the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s (NOAA) Emergency Response Division. The Division provides scientific and technical support to the Coast Guard during oil and chemical spill responses. The Division is based in Seattle, WA, but manages NOAA response efforts nationally.

The soccer ball with Japanese writing, which came from a school in the tsunami zone and later washed up on an Alaskan island. Credit: David Baxter.

By Doug Helton, NOAA

More than a year and thousands of miles later, a soccer ball that had been washed away during the Japan tsunami, turned up on Middleton Island, in the Gulf of Alaska.  Local beachcomber David Baxter found the soccer ball as well as a volleyball with Japanese writing on both of them.  Remarkably, both owners been identified.

The soccer ball’s owner, 16 year-old Misaki Murakami lost everything in the 2011 Japan tsunami and is grateful that this object of sentimental value has been found. He received it in 2005 as a gift from his classmates in third grade before moving to a new elementary school, and one of the messages on the ball reads “Good luck, Murakami!!” (or rather “Hang in there, Murakami!!”). David Baxter and his wife Yumi plan to send him the soccer ball.

The volleyball was traced to a 19 year-old woman, Shiori Sato, whose home was washed away.

This may be one of the first opportunities since the March 2011 tsunami that a remnant washed away from Japan has been identified and could actually be returned to its previous owner. When something gets washed up on a beach, unless it has a unique and traceable identifier, like the registration numbers on a boat, it can be difficult to tell if the item was set adrift by the tsunami, or if it was lost or discarded at sea some other time.

The NOAA Marine Debris Program has been monitoring floating debris from the tsunami for the past year, and some very buoyant items have already made the long journey across the Pacific. The derelict fishing vessel the U.S. Coast Guard ended up sinking off Alaska in early April had drifted at least 4,500 miles before being spotted off Canada’s west coast.

In addition, a few suspect items like plastic fishing floats used in coastal aquaculture in Japan have washed up ashore. But so far most of the reported items can’t be traced definitively back to the tsunami. Marine debris is an everyday problem along the Pacific Coast, and buoyant items like bottles and plastics wash up on our coasts from Asia (and other places) all of the time.

However, some of the most touching items found so far have been these sports balls from Japan. The story of where the soccer ball was found is also interesting.

Middleton Island, Alaska, is by all definitions a very remote place. The 4.5 mile long island in the Gulf of Alaska is about 70 miles from the Alaska mainland, and 50 miles from the nearest island.

A few people work on the treeless and windswept island, where they maintain the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) Radar, Navigation, and Communication facilities there. Bird watching and beach combing are popular recreation activities there. It was David Baxter, a technician at the radar station, who ultimately found the sports balls washed up on the beach.

NOAA is working with the U.S. State Department, the Japanese Embassy, and the Japanese consulate in Seattle to confirm the details of the school connection and to set up a process to return any future items. The soccer ball may be the first identifiable item that could be returned. Unfortunately, the volleyball doesn’t have enough information on it for the Japanese consulate to continue investigating a possible owner, although the technician’s wife is continuing the search on her own.

The loss of life and suffering caused by the tsunami will be felt for generations, and the soccer ball is only one small example of how that event has touched us here in North America.

Information on significant marine debris sightings in the North Pacific Ocean and on the coast is a big help to us as we improve our models and predictions about the debris’ paths. If you find an item you think may be related to the Japan tsunami, take a picture, note the location, and report it to DisasterDebris@noaa.gov.

Edited by Rob Almeida, NOAA’s Neal Parry also contributed to this post.

Neal Parry, winner of NOAA’s “Green Steward” award, solves both systemic and acute challenges associated with the issue of marine debris through project management, policy analysis, partnership building, and creative thinking. He currently serves as a contractor to the NOAA Marine Debris Program, and has responded to numerous incidents including Hurricane Katrina, the 2009 American Samoa tsunami, the Deepwater Horizon/BP oil spill, and the 2011 Japan tsunami.

A view of Delgada Canyon offshore Northern California, as portrayed in NOAA’s new online viewer. Image: NOAA

NOAA this week has released a new viewing tool that allows easier access to sea floor maps and other data on the world’s coasts, continental shelves and and deep ocean.

The new online viewer compiles sea floor data from the near shore to the deep blue, including the latest high-resolution bathymetric (i.e. the underwater equivalent to hypsometry or topography) data collected by NOAA’s Office of Coast Survey primarily to support nautical charting.

“NOAA’s ocean bottom data are critical to so many mission requirements, including coastal safety and resiliency, navigation, healthy oceans and more. They are also just plain beautiful,” said Susan McLean, chief of NOAA’s Marine Geology and Geophysics Division in Boulder, Colo.

McLean’s division is part of NOAA’s National Geophysical Data Center, responsible for compiling, archiving and distributing Earth system data, including Earth observations from space, marine geology information and international natural hazard data and imagery. NGDC’s sea floor data have long been free and open to the public in original science formatting, but that often required the use of specialized software to convert the data into maps and other products.

“For serious scientists, the new viewer allows an important preview capability that will help speed data access and analysis. But its real power is exposing a new audience to NOAA data,” said LCDR Dan Price, bathymetric program manager at NGDC. “I showed the new viewer to my neighbors and they were blown away by the detail and features revealed.”

The new interface uses a “color-shaded relief” technique to depict bathymetric data and derived maps and models. For example, a user can zoom into Delgada Canyon, one of a series of deep canyons off the northern California coast between Fort Bragg and Eureka. The sea floor descends steeply from shallow yellows into dark blues and purples.

“These are critical data for modeling coastal flooding, from tsunami to hurricane storm surge,” said Kelly Carignan, a digital elevation modeler at NGDC.

NOAA’s latest sea floor data, Office of Coast Survey gridded bathymetry data, are archived and displayed in the new viewer through an open source file format known as BAG (Bathymetry Attributed Grid), developed by the Open Navigation Surface Working Group.

LINK: NOAA’s Bathymetry Data Viewer

On a cool April morning in 1947, the S.S. Grandcamp sat docked in Texas City, waiting as it was loaded with sacks of ammonium nitrate fertilizer.  A few years earlier, this humble cargo ship had been part of the U.S. Navy’s Pacific Fleet. After World War II, the U.S. government gave it to France as a gift to help rebuild a shattered Europe, where it was renamed the Grandcamp and converted into a slightly less grand cargo ship, which now found itself waiting fatefully in a Texas port.

The Grandcamp’s freight that day, ammonium nitrate fertilizer, is usually a relatively safe cargo, but it can quickly become unstable and explosive under certain conditions, which is also why it is used as an industrial and military explosive.  Arriving by train in Texas City, this cargo may have become too warm to ship safely, but at the time, few chemical safety regulations existed, and the fertilizer was packed onto the Grandcampalong with its previous shipments of twine, peanuts, tobacco, and 16 cases of small arms ammunition.

Photo taken April 18, 1947. (Courtesy of Special Collections, University of Houston Libraries. UH Digital Library)

Around 8:00 a.m. on April 16, after about 2,300 tons of fertilizer were loaded, workers noticed smoke and vapors coming from the ship.  No one knew what caused the fire in the hold. The captain ordered the hatches battened and tarpaulins thrown over them, calling for steam to be piped into the ship—a firefighting technique he hoped would put out the fire but preserve the cargo. However, this would only make things worse.

Shortly after 9:00 a.m., the ship exploded with tremendous force. The resulting explosion launched the cargo 2,000 to 3,000 feet into the sky, caused a 15-foot tidal wave, and was felt as far as 250 miles away.

A nearby ship, the S.S. High Flyer, also loaded with ammonium nitrate, ignited and about 16 hours later, also exploded.

The combined explosions resulted in the largest industrial disaster of its time in the U.S., taking the lives of an estimated 500–600 people.  Thousands more were injured.

Damaged Texas City houses one mile away from the explosion. Photo taken on April 18, 1947. (Courtesy of Special Collections, University of Houston Libraries. UH Digital Library)

On a warm November evening in 2003, Barge NMS 1477 sat docked in Texas City, just across from the same dock where the Grandcamp had been waiting fatefully 56 years earlier. Loaded with 197,000 gallons of concentrated sulfuric acid (>97%), the barge capsized during the final stages of loading on November 3. With the barge now floating upside down at the dock, acid began slowly leaking from the vents as seawater rushed in, dangerously diluting the acid.

Charlie Henry, then NOAA’s Scientific Support Coordinator for the region, quickly reported to the scene to support the United States Coast Guard Captain of the Port. While the situation appeared stable, the threat of a possible disaster was slowly growing. Inside the bowels of the barge, an aggressive chemical reaction was taking place.

Barge NMS 1477 later tilted on its side, where it was coincidentally located at the same Texas City dock as the S.S. High Flyer. (NOAA

Highly concentrated acid is actually stable when shipping, but partially diluted concentrated sulfuric acid is highly corrosive. As the acid began mixing with small amounts of seawater, it began eating away at the barge’s steel structure, releasing heat and explosive hydrogen gas.

The gravity of this situation was not lost on Charlie and others involved in the response. This was quickly becoming a very dangerous situation for the responders and the local public.

With the gruesome 1947 catastrophe on their minds, the local NOAA responders along with a Louisiana State University chemist providing scientific support arrived at the site of the partially sunken barge on November 5, and the Seattle-based NOAA response team also went into high gear. The response team included the U.S. Coast Guard, the Texas Commission of Environmental Quality, Texas Parks and Wildlife, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, and NOAA, as well as representatives from the barge’s operator, Martin Product Sales LLC, all working together to minimize the impact of this incident.

The dock where the barge overturned in the Port of Texas City in 2004. (NOAA)

The barge had now tilted on its side and rested on the bottom at the dock. This was the same spot that the unfortunate S.S. High Flyer was docked in 1947. Everyone’s immediate concern was the potential for an explosion from the hydrogen gas now built up in the barge. The gas had expanded the barge’s side-plates and vigorously bubbled from vents located underwater near where the side of the barge rested on the bottom.

Since 1947, this area in Texas City had been extensively developed to support the chemical and oil industries, meaning that an explosion on the barge could lead to even more damage and disaster than before.

Because the threat of explosion was so great, the responders made the unusual but necessary decision to do a controlled spill of the vessel’s remaining sulfuric acid into the adjacent harbor waters. To dilute such large volumes of acid to a concentration considered below an environmental hazard, it would have to be mixed with huge volumes of water. The buffering salts in seawater would also help mitigate the acid. The operation was complete by November 13, nine days after the accident.

The decision to intentionally spill the cargo wasn’t easy, but later environmental sampling showed that the acid was highly buffered and diluted when it entered the adjacent open bay. Furthermore, tidal flow and the movement of ships in the area appeared to help reduce the environmental impacts as well. Monitoring continued as the “footprint” of the plume of the discharged acid dissipated throughout the waters.

Aerial photo of Texas City Port taken April 20, 1947. (Courtesy of Special Collections, University of Houston Libraries. UH Digital Library)

Fortunately, a smart use of science helped avoid another explosion in Texas City. The scarred propeller from the S.S. High Flyer sits at the entrance to the Port at Texas City as a reminder of a less fortunate emergency response which now happened 65 years ago.

• 1947 Texas City Disaster | Moore Memorial Public Library
• The Texas City Disaster, 1947 By Hugh W. Stephens | University of Texas Press
• Sulfuric Acid Barge NMS 1477 Leaking | IncidentNews.gov
• Agencies Respond to Capsized Barge | MarineLink.com

CJ Beegle-Krause is president of Research4D, a Seattle-based nonprofit with a mission to bring peer-reviewed research into decision support. She is a former trajectory modeler with NOAA’s Office of Response and Restoration, who worked on this barge incident. More recently, she has been working again with OR&R on the Deepwater Horizon/BP oil spill.

“Science allows us to predict, and thus to respond most appropriately to smaller rapidly-scaling-up events like this barge as well as larger scale environmental disasters.”

Credit: Canada's Department of National Defence

More than a year after the 2011 earthquake and tsunami devastated Japan, a Japanese fishing boat has been found drifting aimlessly off the coast of British Columbia.

The beat up 150-foot trawler was spotted on March 20 by an aircraft while on a routine patrol approximately 150 nautical miles from the southern coast of Canada’s Haida Gwaii islands, drifting south.

Officials have traced the boat to a squid fishing company in Japan, who had confirmed no one was believed to be on the vessel when the tsunami struck.

NOAA, among other organizations, have been warning that marine debris generated by the earthquake and tsunami that struck Japan in March 2011 would be making its way across the Pacific, posing navigational hazards to vessels and threatening coastlines, but what, when, and where the debris is expected to wash up has been difficult to predict.

For more information on tracing marine debris from Japan’s earthquake and tsunami check out this video below and read gCaptain’s coverage on Tracking Marine Debris from the Japanese Tsunami.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Help NOAA by Reporting Marine Debris

Citizen monitoring and reporting can help NOAA scientists better understand the location and nature of the debris generated by the earthquake and tsunami in Japan.

Ships traveling the Pacific Ocean and beachcombers on the coast can now report significant sightings. If reporting a sighting, be sure to include what you saw, when you saw it, and where it was located.  Individuals or groups can request shoreline monitoring guides by emailing MD.monitoring@noaa.gov.

Since debris washes up on our shores regularly, you can also help by downloading the Marine Debris Tracker app for iPhone and Android phones or emailing MD.Monitoring@noaa.gov to request a shoreline survey guide to start collecting information on the amount and location of trash at your beach. This allows NOAA to track changes in how much debris is showing up on U.S. coasts

NOAA has run OSCURS (Ocean Surface Current Simulator), a numeric model for ocean surface currents, to predict the movement of marine debris generated by the Japan tsunami over five years. The results are shown here. Year 1 = red; Year 2 = orange; Year 3 = yellow; Year 4 = light blue; Year 5 = violet. The OCSURS model is used to measure the movement of surface currents over time, as well as the movement of what is in or on the water. Map courtesy of J. Churnside (NOAA OAR) and created through Google.

The World Ocean Council (WOC) is reaching out to the maritime community and vessels transiting between Japan and North America for information and observations of marine debris from the tsunami that devastated Japan on March 11, 2011.

“Reporting on the tsunami debris is an important and immediate opportunity for leadership companies to support the better understanding our changing oceans,” stated Paul Holthus, WOC Executive Director. He added that “Commercial vessels of all sorts provide a cost-effective platform for collecting ocean, weather and climate data where few other options exist. The World Ocean Council is working to coordinate and scale up this valuable role of industry observations through our ‘Smart Ocean/Smart Industries’ program.”

As the surge of water from the tsunami receded, it washed tons of debris out into the Pacific Ocean: everything from boats and pieces of crumbled buildings to appliances and all kinds of plastic, metal, and rubber objects.

Nearly a year later, the Marine debris is predicted to move across the North Pacific toward North America and Hawaii, with forecasts indicating that debris remaining afloat could reach the Northwestern Hawaiian Islands during the current winter and arrive at the west coast of North America in 2013.

However, there is still substantial uncertainty over exactly how much and what types of debris are still floating and where it is located. The initial debris fields observed soon after the tsunami have dispersed.  The heavier objects are likely to have sank, but the types of debris that may still be afloat include vessels, fishing nets and buoys, lumber, cargo containers, and household goods.

To help report marine debris, WOC encourages ships to submit observations and photos of marine debris – as well as reports of ‘no debris observed’ – to: DisasterDebris@noaa.gov

“NOAA is leading efforts to collect data, assess the debris and reduce possible impacts to our natural resources and coastal communities,” said David Kennedy, National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) assistant administrator for the National Ocean Service. “Information from vessels operating in the North Pacific will provide vital documentation of the movement of the tsunami debris, and we appreciate the World Ocean Council’s help in reaching out to the ocean industry and vessel operators who can assist with gathering this data.”

You can also help by downloading the Marine Debris Tracker app for iPhone and Android phones.

Read: Tracking Marine Debris from the Japanese Tsunami

Only 300-400 Right whales are left on this planet.

Don’t be that guy who accidently kills one due to carelessness, keep your speed under 10 knots when these creatures are present.