USGS-NOAA Studies Climate Change Impact on U.S. Coasts

USGS and NOAA have issued a new report that considers the impact that climate change continues to have on the health and vitality of U.S. coastal communities.  Authored by leading scientists and experts, the report emphasizes the need for increased coordination and planning to ensure U.S. coastal communities are resilient against the effects of climate change.

Margaret A. Davidson of NOAA's Office of Ocean and Coastal Resource Management and co-lead author of the report states "Sandy showed us that coastal states and communities need effective strategies, tools and resources to conserve, protect, and restore coastal habitats and economies at risk from current environmental stresses and a changing climate...Easing the existing pressures on coastal environments to improve their resiliency is an essential method of coping with the adverse effects of climate change."

Read the entire report "Coastal Impacts, Adaptation, and Vulnerabilities: a technical input to the 2013 National Climate Assessment" here

Access to Wisconsin's Water Library's Water Research Guide "Climate Change" here

Tsunami Science

Featuring the USGS Tsunami specialist and a clip from NOAA, this quick and informative news video explains the science behind tsunamis. Some important factors include distance from the sea-floor earthquake as well as the topography of the area. The tsunami is caused by an underwater earthquake that forces the ocean floor upward and forcefully pushes the water out of the way, causing it to slam into the shore. The tsunami continues as a series of waves resulting from that undersea earthquake. The waves can be very long lasting and can travel thousands of miles, only stopping from direct impact with a land mass. NOAA and the USGS use monitoring devices to keep track of tsunami activity globally, including near the northern California coast where previous damages have been caused by tsunamis.

For further information about tsunamis, see the NOAA tsunami website. To read about some of the research that is taking place dealing with tsunamis and earthquakes, check this USGS page. The Water Library also has a few tsunami titles for adults and children, please contact us if you are interested in checking these out.

Science.gov Debuts Image Search

Put together by 18 U.S. government science organi-zations spanning 14 Federal Agencies, Science.gov is a website providing access to government science information and research results. It allows users to simultaneously search over 42 scientific databases and 200 million science information web-pages. The site was originally launched in 2002 and has now moved on to version 5.0. The intended audience includes science professionals, students and teachers, and the business community. Further information about the site and its history can be found here.

Recently, science.gov added an image search feature to its page. The link to "Image Search" can be found on the bottom right of the home page, under the heading "Special Collections," and lets users quickly find science images including plant and animal, weather and space, earth and sun, and other images. The image search currently searches three databases simultaneously: The National Biological Information Infrastructure (NBII) Library of Images from the Environment (LIFE), The National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) Image eXchange (NIX), and The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) Photo Library. Other image databases will be added in the future. This credible image collection is a very handy resource that can be used for free by anyone with an internet connection.

Photo of marine iguana found using science.gov image search and credited to NOAA Photo Library.

Lake Superior National Estuarine Research Reserve

The Final Environmental Impact Statement and Management Plan for the Lake Superior National Estuarine Research Reserve have been completed through a collaboration between NOAA, the University of Wisconsin-Extension, and others. On October 26th, a public designation ceremony will take place in Superior, WI. The Lake Superior Reserve, will be the second Great Lakes freshwater estuarine reserve in the system, and the 28th reserve overall. It will serve as an expansion of the biogeographic representation of the Reserve System(map).

NERRS Reserve Banner photo courtesy of www.nerrs.noaa.gov

Mayor of Bayfield Wins Award, Going Traveling

Mayor Larry J. MacDonald of Bayfield Wisconsin was recently awarded the Peter Wege Award for best sustainable practices for a Great Lakes City under 100,000. Mayor MacDonald is a member of the UW Sea Grant Advisory Council.

In addition to the award, MacDonald will attend an invitation-only, all-expense-paid coastal economics workshop in Charleston, S.C., sponsored by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), meant to help the NOAA Coastal Services Center identify what kind of information coastal managers need to make decisions later this month. And in October, the Embassy of Sweden has invited MacDonald, along with nine other U.S. mayors, to an all-expense-paid First European Green Capital Conference.

Congratulations, Mayor MacDonald!

City of Bayfield website.

Bayfield's eco-municipality initiative.

Recent AquaLog post about Mayor MacDonald.

photo courtesy of the city of Bayfield website

2009 NOAA State of the Climate Report Released

Our climate, defined as the long-term average of weather patterns, is changing. Data has been collected by more than 300 scientists reviewing key climate indicators which prove that the world has warmed. Coastal communities are one group threatened by climate warming. As water temperature increases, the water’s area expands, and an increased volume of melting ice sheets and glaciers are also accountable for rising sea levels. Written by an array of experts, the State of the Climate Report annually documents “the status of the climate system and our ability to observe it.” (p. 9) The concise Highlights report is available here, or you can view the full report here.

Arctic Sea Annual Ice Minimum (picture) from 2009 The State of the Climate Highlights.

Climate news from NOAA

The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) has just issued temperature data for April 2010 and the data shows that last month was the warmest April on record around the world.

Read the details here.

News from Wisconsin Sea Grant

Riding on the heels of its successful 2007 lecture series “Climate Change in the Great Lakes: Starting a Public Discussion,” Wisconsin Sea Grant has been awarded a $293,000 grant from the NOAA Climate Program Office Sectoral Applications Research Program (SARP).

The two-year grant partners Wisconsin Sea Grant with the University Corporation for Atmospheric Research’s Cooperative Operational Meteorology, Education and Training (COMET) Program to develop centralized training for Sea Grant Extension agents and specialists to enable them to deliver consistent, science‐based messages regarding the likely effects of climate change in coastal areas.

Wisconsin Sea Grant and COMET will develop an interactive Web site to serve as a portal for the training course and permit NOAA and Sea Grant climate researchers to interact to bring up-to-date scientific information to coastal stakeholders. The resulting “wiki”—a collection of Web pages on climate-related topics that allows approved individuals to contribute or modify content—will help disseminate timely coastal climate information (climate change impacts, research results, reports, publications, etc.), and will continue to grow as new knowledge and information become available. The wiki will increase interaction between key NOAA scientists and coastal stakeholders through Sea Grant Extension and provide a forum for current climate science discussions.

To learn more, go to UW Sea Grant.

Lake Michigan marine sanctuary

MANITOWOC — Representatives from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and Wisconsin Historical Society were met with open arms by area divers Wednesday, who seemed excited and pleased at the possibility of opening a marine sanctuary in the area around Lake Michigan.

Ellen Brody, the regional coordinator for the Great Lakes and Northeast Region for NOAA was grinning ear-to-ear after a successful hour-long meeting at Maritime Divers where locals seemed to embrace the possibility of a sanctuary.

"We've been blown away by the support here," Brody said. "I'm not really feeling like there is going to be opposition to this."

The purpose of a marine sanctuary would be to study and preserve the many shipwrecks in Lake Michigan. The study area for the proposed sanctuary begins just north of Two Rivers and stretches through Manitowoc, Cleveland, Sheboygan and Port Washington.

To read this entire article, go to Herald Times Reporter.
To learn more about marine sanctuaries around the nation, go to NOAA.

Rip currents awareness week

Rip Current Awareness Week
June 7-13, 2009

In an effort to heighten public awareness of rip currents at surf beaches, each year NOAA designates the first full week of June as national Rip Current Awareness Week, coinciding with the traditional start of the summer vacation season.

Rip currents are currents of water moving away from shore. The strongest rip currents can attain speeds reaching 8 feet per second; this is faster than an Olympic swimmer can sprint! On average, more people die every year from rip currents than from shark attacks, tornadoes or lightning. According to the United States Lifesaving Association, 80 percent of surf beach rescues are attributed to rip currents, and more than 100 people die annually from drowning in rip currents.

To learn more, go to NOAA's Rip Current Safety website.

Great Lakes Aquatic Nonindigenous Species Information System (GLANSIS)

The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Association (NOAA) has a National Center for Research on Aquatic Invasive Species (NCRAIS). This Center has provided a database to search over 180 nonindigenous species reported to have reproducing populations in the Great Lakes basin, with individual fact sheets for about 70% of them. Fact sheets include photos, identification, native range, means of introduction of the species and current status. For more information on the database structure, criteria for listing a species, and to search the actual database, go to NCRAIS.

NOAA Report Calls Flame Retardants Concern to U.S. Coastal Ecosystems

NOAA scientists, in a first-of-its-kind report issued today, state that Polybrominated Diphenyl Ethers (PBDEs), chemicals commonly used in commercial goods as flame retardants since the 1970s, are found in all United States coastal waters and the Great Lakes, with elevated levels near urban and industrial centers.

The new findings are in contrast to analysis of samples as far back as 1996 that identified PBDEs in only a limited number of sites around the nation.

To view full report, go to NOAA.

Google Earth now includes third coast

When Google Earth 5.0 was released back in February, it included the capability to view the world ocean landscape from beneath the water surface. This capability now extends to the “Third Coast” of the United States, the Great Lakes. Through a cooperative effort with the NOAA Great Lakes Environmental Research Laboratory (GLERL) and the NOAA National Geophysical Data Center, Google Earth now incorporates detailed bathymetry for the five Great Lakes. Users will be able to explore features such as the canyons and shoals in eastern Lake Superior, the Lake Michigan mid-lake reef complex, and the old river channel, now underwater, that once connected Lakes Michigan and Huron at the Straits of Mackinac.

To highlight some of the interesting coastal and subsurface features of the Great Lakes, the NOAA Great Lakes Environmental Research Laboratory has assembled a narrated Google Earth tour, which you can download at Google's LatLong blog.

In the News

A recent article from the University of Wisconsin Sea Grant Institute's quarterly publication, the Aquatic Sciences Chronicle, featured a story on wild rice harvesting by Anthony Kern, a Sea Grant-funded researcher. Kern is examining the genetic makeup of remaining populations to find out how to preserve the identity of wild rice while expanding its distribution along the Lake Superior and Lake Michigan coastlines.

This article is now a feature on the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Association's research Web site. Please take a look at the happenings of NOAA, Wisconsin Sea Grant, and research on wild rice.

In the News

Michael Scott, a reporter for The Plain Dealer based in Cleveland, Ohio, looks into Great Lakes ice cover and what it may mean to climate change studies. The article, focuses on the research of Jia Wang and Ray Assel, investigators for NOAA's Great Lakes Environmental Research Laboratory (GLERL).

To view their research, go to GLERL's website.

For additional information, go to the Great Lakes Ice Cover brochure.

Three NOAA resources

Three resources to explore from National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration:

National Marine Sanctuary

An online vault where a comprehensive collection of select video clips and high-resolution still images from America's underwater treasures are securely stored and available for searchable access and download.

Local Fisheries Knowledge Project

Looking through the lens of marine fisheries, high school students learn about history, culture, science, language arts, and business as part of NOAA’s pilot Local Fisheries Knowledge Project.

NOAA Shoreline Website

This website was developed and designed by the NOAA Coastal Services Center. The purpose of this resource is "to eliminate confusion about vector shoreline data by providing information about and access to shorelines that are generated by federal agencies." Visitors to the site are able to access shoreline data, searching by type of data, application, and scale. There are also features on shoreline mapping history, policy and management, and applications such as cartographic representation.