Tag: healthy oceans

The amount of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere reached a new record high in 2013, propelled by a surge in levels of carbon dioxide. This is according to the World Meteorological Organization's annual Greenhouse Gas Bulletin, which injected even greater urgency into the need for concerted international action against accelerating and potentially devastating climate change. The Greenhouse Gas Bulletin showed that between 1990 and 2013 there was a 34% increase in radiative forcing - the warming effect on our climate - because of long-lived greenhouse gases such as carbon dioxide (CO2), methane and nitrous oxide. In 2013, concentration of CO2 in the atmosphere was 142% of the pre-industrial era (1750), and of methane and nitrous oxide 253% and 121% respectively. The observations from WMO's Global Atmosphere Watch (GAW) network showed that CO2 levels increased more between 2012 and 2013 than during any other year since 1984. Preliminary data indicated that this was possibly related to reduced CO2 uptake by the earth's biosphere in addition to the steadily increasing CO2 emissions. The WMO Greenhouse Gas Bulletin reports on atmospheric concentrations - and not emissions - of greenhouse gases. Emissions represent what goes into the atmosphere. Concentrations represent what remains in the atmosphere ...

Commissioner Robert Hill from Australia and Deputy Executive Secretary Rémi Parmentier presented the Global Ocean Commission’s final report at the UN SIDS conference. The UN conference on Small Islands Developing States (SIDS) which just took place in Samoa was the opportunity for the Global Ocean Commission to further engage with SIDS governments and stakeholders. On 1st September, a delegation made up of Commissioner Robert Hill from Australia and Deputy Executive Secretary Rémi Parmentier presented the Commission's recent report "From Decline to Recovery - A Rescue Package for the Global Ocean" at an event co-sponsored by SPREP, the South Pacific Regional Environmental Programme, chaired by SPREP Deputy Director General Kosi Latu. In a keynote address delivered on behalf of President Tommy Remengesau, Palau's Minister of Natural Resources and the Environment, Umiich Sengebau welcomed the proposals of the Global Ocean Commission, especially the ideas contained to combat IUU - illegal, unregulated and unreported - fishing, and the Commission's call to eliminate high seas fishing fleet's fuel subsidies. "We agree with the Global Ocean Commission that it is high time for developed countries with distant water fleets to act in accordance with their international obligations, and stop fuel subsidies to the fleets operating ...

During an expedition with the German research vessel Polarsternoff the sub-Antarctic island of South Georgia, an international team of scientists discovered more than 130 active methane seeps at the seafloor. According to chief scientist and MARUM researcher Gerhard Bohrmann, this is the first report of greenhouse gases seeping out of the seabed in the Southern Ocean. The finding was recently published in the Earth and Planetary Science Letters. Continental and marine seepage of methane is a research issue of global importance. According to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change methane is about 21 times more powerful in warming the atmosphere than carbon dioxide. However, it is uncertain how much methane is emitted at the seafloor and whether it could eventually reach the atmosphere. To answer these and other questions, German, British, and US-American scientists embarked with the German RV Polarstern in the spring of 2013 in search of the Antarctic pieces of the global methane puzzle. "Our hydro-acoustic survey with the shipboard echo sounders focused on two bays off the north-eastern coast of South Georgia", says chief scientist Gerhard Bohrmann. "An especially close-meshed survey grid was carried out in Cumberland Bay, within visual range of the buildings of the historic ...

The latest Small Business Research Initiative (SBRI) competition was launched at the NOC in Southampton - making £1.5 million available to UK businesses to develop novel adaptive autonomous ocean sampling network (AOSN) management systems. The competition, run by the Natural Environment Research Council, in partnership with the Defence Science and Technology Laboratory (DSTL) and Innovate UK, will see funds made available to assess and develop novel adaptive autonomous ocean sampling network (AAOSN) management systems. These systems will need to be capable of coordinating a suite of marine autonomous systems, enable the gathering of data from the ocean over periods of several months and have the ability to track and sample dynamic features. The competition will run in two phases: phase one opened on 2 September for feasibility studies, with contracts to be awarded, for those selected, in mid-December and completed by 31 March 2015. Up to five phase one studies will be funded up to a cost including VAT of £50,000 each. After a review of the outcomes of the phase one studies, selected participants will be invited to apply for phase two for the development of prototypes, which would be capable of undertaking demonstration missions at sea. It is ...

As part of a large-scale summer Arctic research expedition "Kara-Summer - 2014" a meteorological station was installed that meets the latest modern requirements for such equipment, on the island of Uedinenie. The expedition organized by the "Arctic Research and Development Center" (a joint venture of "Rosneft" and ExxonMobil), with the support of the specialists from the FGBI "Arctic and Antarctic Scientific Research Institute" has completed the restoration of the system of meteorological observations in the Kara Sea, where previously as commissioned by the Company three more stations were installed. This will allow supplying the region with a full-fledged complex of meteorological monitoring. Also, preventive maintenance of all previously installed meteorological stations on the archipelago Novaya Zemlya was carried out. The Company is systematically implementing an extensive program to restore all systems of meteorological observations in the Arctic, and the expedition is planning to install a few more meteorological stations in the Laptev Sea and the East Siberian Sea. A unified network of meteorological observation will not only allow optimizing the works on geological exploration and increasing the effectiveness of extraction works, but it will also enable a series of large-scale scientific and research programs to study the region. The amount ...

NOAA scientists and partners are launching a number of new unmanned aircraft and water vehicles to collect weather information as part of a coordinated effort to improve hurricane forecasts. Several of these research projects and other NOAA led efforts to improve hurricane forecasting were made possible, in part, because of the Disaster Relief Appropriations Act of 2013. The act was passed by Congress and signed by the President in the wake of Hurricane Sandy. It provides $60 billion in funding to multiple agencies for disaster relief. NOAA received $309.7 million to provide technical assistance to those states with coastal and fishery impacts from Sandy, and to improve weather forecasting and weather research and predictive capability to help future preparation, response and recovery from similar events. Unmanned Planes Gather Storm Details As hard as meteorologists work to forecast storms - even flying planes straight into hurricanes to measure wind speed, direction, water vapor and other data - prediction remains an imprecise science. This is particularly true when forecasting hurricane wind speed, known as hurricane intensity. To improve this predictive aspect of our environmental intelligence, NOAA scientists and partners are sending unmanned aircraft into places where it would be unsafe, impossible or ...

Last month the U.N. Open Working Group on Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) submitted seventeen SDGs to the U.N. General Assembly. The SDGs will form the basis for the global sustainable development agenda from 2015 through 2030. One of these goals - the Ocean SDG - aims to “Conserve and sustainably use the oceans, seas and marine resources for sustainable development”. Ocean industries are encouraged to send comments about the Ocean SDG to the WOC by 29 August to ensure ocean business community input to the International Chamber of Commerce (ICC) submission to the U.N. on the draft SDGs. Ocean industry representatives are also invited and encouraged to attend the WOC Business Forum on Ocean Policy and Planning (New York, 29-30 September, 2014) where the ocean business community will determine priorities for engaging on ocean policy, including for the Ocean SDG. Specific targets of the Ocean SDG include: Preventing and significantly reducing marine pollution of all kinds - by 2025. Sustainably managing and protecting marine and coastal ecosystems to avoid significant adverse impacts - by 2020. Minimizing and addressing the impacts of ocean acidification - no target date. Restoring fish stocks by regulating harvesting, ending overfishing, illegal, unreported and unregulated (IUU) fishing and ...

"The new elevation maps are snapshots of the current state of the ice sheets. The elevations are very accurate, to just a few metres in height, and cover close to 16 million km2 of the area of the ice sheets. This is 500,000 square kilometres more than any previous elevation model from altimetry", says lead-author Dr. Veit Helm, glaciologist at the Alfred Wegener Institute in Bremerhaven. For the new digital maps, the AWI scientists had evaluated all data by the CryoSat-2 altimeter SIRAL. Satellite altimeter measure the height of an ice sheet by sending radar or laser pulses in the direction of the earth. These signals are then reflected by the surface of the glaciers or the surrounding waters and are subsequently retrieved by the satellite. This way the scientists were able to precisely determine the elevation of single glaciers and to develop detailed maps. On the basis of further CrysoSat-2 the scientists also documented how the elevation has changed over the 2011-2014 period. Ice sheets gain mass through snowfall and lose it due to melting and accelerating glaciers, which carry ice from the interior of the ice sheet to the ocean. "We need to understand where and to which ...

Scientists at the National Oceanography Centre (NOC) have secured a three-year contract with the European Space Agency (ESA) to carry out ‘quality control' checks on ocean data captured by one of its satellites. The team at NOC were approached by ESA to analyse data recorded by CryoSat-2, due to their extensive knowledge and expertise in this field and their access to existing oceanographic databases. The CryoSat-2 satellite was launched in 2010 to measure the thickness of ice sheets and polar sea ice using an advanced on-board radar altimeter, but scientists later proved that it could also capture ocean data with much more precision than previous satellite equipment. It is able to more accurately map surface currents and height of waves and also measures surface winds - allowing tracking of extreme events such as storm surges. The satellite collects data continuously and these are provided in three versions of increasing accuracy: in near real-time, more accurate data that are just few days old and 30 day data which are the most accurate. The team at NOC will be carrying out scientific ‘quality control' on these satellite data to validate their accuracy. They will be looking at the information collected and comparing ...

The wealth of knowledge gathered over the past five years under the Pacific Adaptation to Climate Change (PACC) Project is now being shared through a range of newly launched resources. The regional project is the first major adaptation initiative covering three components including mainstreaming climate change, a demonstration project and the development and communication of knowledge products. Fourteen Pacific island countries are participant to the project, which targets food production and security, water resource and management as well as coastal management. All that was learnt over the past five years in carrying out this project, both at national and regional level, is now being made available so future projects can build on these. "Australia sees the experiences and knowledge gained from the PACC project as a major body of new knowledge for the region" stated Ms. Ilisapeci Masivesi at the launch of the products. She is the Program Manager Environment and Development of Department of Foreign Affairs & Trade - Suva Post, Government of Australia. "Climate change adaptation will continue to be an ongoing challenge and therefore the knowledge management products are important to ensure that the lessons learnt are remembered and used in the years to come." The products ...