Danielle Renart opening a new world at NOAA's Bring A Child To Work Day in Silver Spring, Maryland. As National Ocean Service liaison to the program coordination office in Washington, DC, Danielle talked about her studies and career. During the day, kids also learned about habitat, the chemistry of seawater, how we handle oil spills, and surprises and dangers beneath the sea. Young visitors could even rename a site, print out a chart, and become "cartographers for a day."

NOAA Weather Radio/Mark Trail Awards will be presented at a luncheon on May 23 on Capitol Hill. This 2nd annual event will recognize the outstanding contributions of 13 individuals, states and organizations in using or providing NOAA Weather Radio receivers and transmitters to save lives and property.

With the pen of Jack Elrod, the syndicated Mark Trail cartoon strip has been educating about the environment since 1950. In the last five years, Jack has featured NOAA science nearly 50 times. For all these years, Jack has been driving home critical messages about being prepared, playing it safe, and taking the necessary steps. He entertains and educates - about tropical storms, marine sanctuaries, endangered species, and our fragile coral reefs. He's taught readers to love nature, but respect its warnings; to relish camping but dodge its dangers; to enjoy dolphins yet still protect them. Jack explains how clouds float - and why sunsets are red. No aspect of the environment is missed by his pen.

Either flee or perish is the fate of animals living in a smothering layer near the bottom of the northern Gulf of Mexico. Stretching for about 7,000 square miles off of Louisiana's coast, this hypoxic, or dead zone, lacks oxygen because of pollutants flowing into the gulf from the Mississippi River. Anything that can't move out eventually dies. The size of the zone fluctuates. Right now, it's the size of New Jersey.

Spider crab suffocation

Encroaching dead zone in Gulf of Mexico

Earlier this year, the National Ocean Service, led by chief scientist Don Scavia, was key in developing consensus on an action plan to address the zone. The aim is to cut nitrogen discharge by 30% by 2015. NOS led an integrated scientific assessment that assembled over a decade of research on causes and consequences; analyzed costs and benefits of actions to reduce, mitigate and control hypoxia; and described a framework for adaptive management covering action, management and research.

• NOS Hypoxia Publication

Happy 40th Birthday to NOAA's National Oceanographic Data Center in Silver Spring, Maryland. The center is the place to go for information on everything from global sea level to beach temperatures around the country. Data address climate change, management of coastal and deep water resources, marine transportation, and natural disasters.

Director H. Lee Dantzler says the center houses the world's largest publicly accessible collection of global oceanographic data. It's an archive for the world's scientific and public users. Foreign data is collected and maintained through direct exchanges with other countries. The center hosts the NOAA Central Library with its regional libraries in Miami and Seattle. It also supports NOAA field libraries or information centers at about 30 U.S. sites. The center itself has field offices with major oceanographic facilities in Hawaii, California, Massachusetts, Mississippi, Florida, and Washington. Under the auspices of the National Academy of Sciences, it also serves as the U.S. World Data Center for Oceanography.

• NOAA's National Oceanographic Data Center
  
  
• NOAA Central Library

NOAA and the Canadian Space Agency jointly sponsored a SAR Users Symposium, highlighting a scientific tool demonstrating promise in monitoring and supporting response to serious environmental hazards. Helen Wood, director of NOAA's Office of Satellite Data Processing and Distribution, co-chaired the symposium.

SAR stands for spaceborne synthetic aperture radar. It is an active radar remote-sensing method capable of providing all-weather, day/night, high resolution imagery of surface roughness and centimeter-scale changes in land features, such as those occurring during earthquakes and prior to volcanic eruptions.

With today's headlines telling us of an alarming number of natural and human-induced disasters worldwide - floods in India and Mozambique, earthquakes in El Salvador and India, an oil spill in the Galapagos, volcanic eruptions in Alaska and Mexico - SAR instruments are well suited to a wide range of practical applications. They can work in oceanography, meteorology, forestry, and agriculture, among numerous others.

SAR data is now used routinely for coastal wind measurements, river flood mapping, fisheries management, and Arctic and Great Lakes ice analyses that support safe navigation and weather forecasting. Within the next few years, data may be available in sufficient qualities to be used in the daily missions of NOAA and other environmental agencies. For symposium presentations: http://orbit35i.nesdis.noaa.gov/orad/sarconference.

• Earth Watching Home Page
  
  
• RadarSat Information
  

Global Warming and Hurricanes is the focus of an article coming out this June in Journal of Climate. This article updates an earlier article published in Science and authored by NOAA Research scientists Tom Knutson and Robert Tuleya, of the Geophysical Fluid Dynamics Laboratory in Princeton, and Yoshio Kurihara, now retired from NOAA. In the upcoming article, Tom and Robert teamed up with two University of Rhode Island scientists.

This more recent work supports earlier conclusions that the strongest hurricanes in the present climate may be upstaged by even more intense hurricanes over the coming century. The NOAA scientists used a more advanced hurricane model -- incorporating ocean coupling -- than has been used in any previous simulation of hurricane intensity changes under future climate conditions. The new model simulates a similar percentage increase of hurricane intensity under warm climate conditions as the original model, but with the ocean coupling effect included.

More intense hurricanes may occur as the earth''s climate is warmed by increasing levels of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere. Most hurricanes do not reach their maximum potential intensity before weakening over land or cooler ocean regions. However, those storms that do approach their upper-limit intensity are expected to be slightly stronger (by 5-10%) and have more rainfall in the warmer climate because of higher sea surface temperatures.

More complete details at http://www.gfdl.noaa.gov/~tk/glob_warm_hurr.html

-- Click image for larger version --

Sea surface temperatures (SSTs, light contours and color shading, in degrees Celsius) and sea level pressure (dark contours, in millibars) from an idealized coupled hurricane model/ocean model experiment. The "cool wake" in SSTs produced by the hurricane is indicated by the lower SSTs to the east-southeast of the storm. The storm motion is toward the west-northwest.