China plunges into ocean research

China s most advanced research vessel Kexue was commissioned in east China s Shandong Province last October 2013 indicating that China s oceanic research capability has reached the world advance level.

The research vessel Kexue will map the sea floor in the western Pacific.

From Nature by Jeff Tellefson

Six centuries ago, Chinese explorer Zheng He set sail into the Pacific Ocean with hundreds of vessels, starting a series of seven expeditions that extended China’s maritime influence from Indonesia to the Red Sea.

 The route of the voyages of Zheng He's fleet.

China’s latest foray into the Pacific will be smaller but much more advanced.
It will plumb a part of the ocean that could hold important secrets about east Asia’s summer monsoon and the periodic changes in ocean temperature known as El Niño and La Niña.

Set to begin in April, the five-year research project will deploy five ships, a remotely operated submersible and an array of sub-surface moorings off the eastern coasts of the Philippines and Indonesia.
The region is home to the western Pacific warm pool, a patch of surface water that is formed by trade winds that influence the formation of El Niño and La Niña in the eastern Pacific.
The oscillation between these periods of warming and cooling affects global climate, and the pool itself might influence regional climate events such as the Asian monsoon.

The Western Pacific Ocean System (WPOS) project is the largest single investment yet in China’s growing ocean-sciences programme, says Song Sun, a marine ecologist at the Chinese Academy of Science’s Institute of Oceanology in Qingdao.
Over the past three years, the country has invested roughly 1.2 billion yuan (US$200 million) into Pacific Ocean science.
Another $165 million will be spent on equipment and basic research costs for the WPOS project, and around 1,000 people are expected to participate.
“It is a dream for Chinese marine scientists to go to the deep blue,” Sun says.
Six arrays, comprising 29 moorings, form the core of the effort (see ‘Deep dive’).
The arrays will monitor ocean currents at depths of between 400 and 6,000 metres, including the start of the powerful Kuroshio current, which runs northeastwards through the East China Sea.
“We have had sporadic observations in different seasons, but we’ve never been able to get a comprehensive view of the oceanic currents in this region,” says Wenju Cai, a climate modeller at the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation in Aspendale, Australia.

 “It is a dream for Chinese marine scientists to go to the deep blue.”

Dunxin Hu, a colleague of Sun’s and a leader of the WPOS programme, says that the data should help oceanographers to understand the movement, temperature and nutrient load of various currents that circulate through the warm pool.
Scientists are particularly interested in the Kuroshio current because it plays an important part in global ocean circulation and helps to shape coastal ecology.
A key part of the ecosystem research will track the flow of nutrients into China’s coastal waters and assess their influence on plankton blooms and fisheries.

The data could also prove valuable for climate modellers.
Trade winds from the east have been unusually strong over the past two decades (M. H. England et al. Nature Clim. Change http://doi.org/rdt; 2014), which has pushed greater volumes of warm water into the region and, ultimately, into the deeper ocean.
The process has helped to stall the rise in global temperatures, which have remained relatively constant since 1998, but exactly what is happening in the deep ocean remains unclear.
Hu says that data from the moorings could be used to trace the heat’s journey through the deep ocean.
They could also reveal how the warm pool influences atmospheric convection and therefore regional climate, such as the monsoon in China.

One of the biggest challenges will be linking the deep-sea data to conditions at the ocean surface and in the atmosphere.
Many of the moorings will be in fishing areas, and worries about theft and vandalism mean that they will not include surface buoys.
To get the surface data, scientists will need to incorporate observations from satellites and from the global Argo network of floats that provide periodic data about temperature and salinity to a depth of 2,000 metres.
“That, I think, is the missing piece,” says Shang-Ping Xie, a climate modeller at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography in La Jolla, California.

Researchers also plan to investigate the deep-sea geology and ecology.
They will deploy sonar-imaging equipment from a ship dubbed Kexue (which means ‘science’) to map the ocean floor.
After identifying seamounts and hydrothermal vents, the team will send down the remotely operated submersible Faxian, which is capable of diving to roughly 4,500 metres, to study the creatures that inhabit these areas, such as sponges and exotic fish.

Peter Brewer, an ocean chemist at the Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute in California, helped to develop the submersible.
He admires the Chinese scientists’ dive into ocean science.
“They are at the stage where they have all of the hardware,” he says.
“Now they need to train some young scientists so that they can take advantage of it.”

Links :

• China Tech Gadget : China's expanding marine scientific research fleet

Whale spotting from space is fun, efficient and accurate

Satellites help spot whales - animation

From TechTimes by Alex Saltarin

Scientists have found a new way of keeping track of whale populations.
Using high-resolution images taken by satellites high up in orbit, scientists are now able to count individual whales in the world's oceans.

 The technology has been successfully tested to count southern right whales in the Golfo Nuevo, off the coast of Argentina, pictured, and it is hoped the scheme will be rolled out globally

Before this new technique was conceived, scientists had to count whales using a more primitive and painstaking method.
Researchers and volunteers had to board ships and count whales by looking for distinctive blowholes sprays and the occasional jumping whale.
Aside from being inefficient and time consuming, this method is also not very accurate.
Moreover, scientists are limited to counting whales one small area at a time.
With the new method, however, scientists have something even better than a bird's eye view of the oceans.

A team of scientists has used high-resolution satellite imagery to count whales.

The images taken from orbit give scientists useful data for the the conservation and documentation of whale populations.

Pictured here are composite images of southern right whales seen from orbit.
(Photo : BAS)

"This is a proof of concept study that proves whales can be identified and counted by satellite," says lead author Peter Fretwell of the British Antarctic Survey (BAS).
"Whale populations have always been difficult to assess; traditional means of counting them are localized, expensive and lack accuracy."
"The ability to count whales automatically, over large areas in a cost effective way will be of great benefit to conservation efforts for this and potentially other whale species," Fretwell adds.

 This shot features a selection of eight comparable false colour images of suspected whales found by the state-of-the-art analysis software

Aside from reducing the time it takes to count whale populations, using images taken by satellites also significantly reduces the cost of these surveys.
Fretwell and his colleagues published their findings in the online journal PLOS ONE.
While using satellites to count whales isn't exactly a new idea, previous attempts proved to be inaccurate due to limitations in technology.
With today's crop of next generation satellites, however, counting whales from space is now both practical and accurate.

The team of researchers used a satellite image taken by the WorldView 2 satellite to count southern right whales that have gathered in a bay to mate and to give birth to young whales.
The location was chosen due to the fact that the bay had shallow waters, which made it easier for the scientists to count the individual whales in the area.

 New high resolution satellite image processing technology allows researchers to identify and count right whales at the ocean surface or to depths of up to 15 metres — described as a boon to tracking the health of whale populations.

The southern right whale is an endangered species that was almost driven to extinction due to excessive whaling.
Scientists have been looking for an accurate method of gauging their current numbers to see how well the populations were growing.

"Visual inspection of the image showed that a number of offshore objects, that were both the right shape and size (5 - 15 m) to be whales, could be identified in both the colour and the panchromatic bands," says Fretwell and his colleagues.
"Most of these objects were visible across all bands although in most cases the high resolution of the panchromatic band rendered the objects in greater detail."

Links :

• BBC : Scientists count whales from space 
• GISLounge : Tracking whales with satellite imagery

Warming Arctic may be causing Jet Stream to lose its way

The jet stream that circles Earth's north pole travels west to east.

But when the jet stream interacts with a Rossby wave, as shown here, the winds can wander far north and south, bringing frigid air to normally mild southern states.

From NPR

Mark Twain once said: "If you don't like the weather in New England now, just wait a few minutes."
 He was making an unknowing reference to the jet stream, which drives the weather over North America and Europe like a high-altitude conveyor belt.

Enormous waves break on Porthcawl Harbour, South Wales,

in early January as storms batter Britain.

But increasingly, the jet stream is taking a more circuitous route over the northern latitudes, meaning weather systems hang around longer than they used to.

And a warming Arctic is probably to blame, says Jennifer Francis, a professor at Rutgers University's Institute of Marine and Coastal Sciences.
Francis — who says it's too early to know if the well-established Arctic warming is caused by man or some natural phenomenon — was speaking during a session on Arctic change at the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science in Chicago on Saturday.
The wayward jet stream could account for the persistently severe winter weather this year in the U.S. and Britain, as well as California's long drought.

 Map of north America showing the extremely cold weather front headed south

In all of the talk recently about the "polar vortex," you've already heard some of this.
But as Wired UK explains:

"The strength of the jet stream is directly proportional to the difference in temperature between the poles and the tropics. When it's strong, the jet stream tends to take a straighter path, but when it's weak it meanders. As the Arctic is experiencing warming at faster rates than the tropics, that difference is getting smaller, so the jet stream is weakening along with it.
"What that means for mid-latitudes, where Britain [and the U.S. are] located, is weather that stays in place for longer. Weather patterns will be more likely to get 'stuck' over a location, yielding long periods of rain and sun rather than Britain's traditional 'changeable' skies."

 Snow cover in the eastern U.S. on Jan. 22.

A deadly winter storm that week dumped more than 15 inches of snow in some places, with frigid temperatures forcing school closings and extensive flight delays and cancellations

"The temperature difference between the Arctic and lower latitudes is one of the main sources of fuel for the jet stream; it's what drives the winds. And because the Arctic is warming so fast, that temperature difference is getting smaller, and so the fuel for the jet stream is getting weaker," Francis says. "
When it gets into this pattern, those big waves tend to stay in the same place for some time.
The pattern we've seen in December and January has been one of these very wavy patterns.
"It doesn't mean that every year the U.K. is going to be in a stormy pattern," she adds.
"Next year you could have very dry conditions, and for that to be persistent. You can't say that flooding is going to happen more often. Next year may be dry, but whatever you get is going to last longer."

Mark Serreze, the director of the U.S. National Snow and Ice Data Center, was on the panel along with Francis.
He says the idea that changes in the polar north could influence mid-latitude weather, was a new and lively area of research.
"Fundamentally, the strong warming that might drive this is tied in with the loss of sea-ice cover that we're seeing, because the sea-ice cover acts as this lid that separates the ocean from a colder atmosphere," Serreze says.
"If we remove that lid, we pump all this heat up into the atmosphere. That is a good part of the signal of warming that we're now seeing, and that could be driving some of these changes."

Links :

• BBC : Wavier jet stream 'may drive weather shift' 
• Ars Technica : Melting Arctic sea ice could be altering jet stream 

US NOAA update in the Marine GeoGarage

As our public viewer is not yet available
(currently under construction, upgrading to Google Maps API v3 as v2 is officially no more supported),
this info is primarily intended to our iPhone/iPad universal mobile application users
(Marine US on the App Store)
and also to our B2B customers which use our nautical charts layers in their own webmapping applications through our GeoGarage API.

13 charts have been updated in the Marine GeoGarage

(NOAA update January 2014)

• 11302 ed34 Intracoastal Waterway Stover Point to Port Brownsville. including Brazos Santiago Pass
• 11303 ed22 Intracoastal Waterway Laguna Madre - Chubby Island to Stover Point. including The Arroyo Colorado
• 11373 ed51 Mississippi Sound and approaches Dauphin Island to Cat Island
• 11376 ed57 Mobile Bay Mobile Ship Channel-Northern End
• 12233 ed38 Potomac River Chesapeake Bay to Piney Point
• 12248 ed44 James River Newport News to Jamestown Island; Back River and College Creek
• 12256 ed18 Chesapeake Bay Thimble Shoal Channel
• 12264 ed32 Chesapeake Bay Patuxent River and Vicinity
• 14882 ed36 St. Marys River - Detour Passage to Munuscong Lake;Detour Passage
• 14883 ed44 St. Marys River - Munuscong Lake to Sault Ste. Marie
• 14884 ed40 St. Marys River - Head of Lake Nicolet to Whitefish Bay;Sault Ste. Marie
• 14962 ed21 St. Marys River to Au Sable Point;Whitefish Point;Little Lake Harbors;Grand Marais Harbor
• 25644 ed15 Frederiksted Road;Frederiksted Pier

Today 1025 NOAA raster charts (2167 including sub-charts) are included in the Marine GeoGarage viewer (see PDFs files)

Note : GeoGarage blog : Great Lakes mariners get new NOAA nautical chart for St. Mary’s River


How do you know if you need a new nautical chart?
See the changes in new chart editions.
NOAA chart dates of recent Print on Demand editions

Note : NOAA updates their nautical charts with corrections published in:

• U.S. Coast Guard Local Notices to Mariners (LNMs),
• National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency Notices to Mariners (NMs), and
• Canadian Coast Guard Notices to Mariners (CNMs)

While information provided by this Web site is intended to provide updated nautical charts, it must not be used as a substitute for the United States Coast Guard, National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency, or Canadian Coast Guard Notice to Mariner publications

Please visit the NOAA's chart update service for more info.

Louisiana bays and bayous vanish from nautical maps

From USA Today

Flip Tayamen has seen the wetlands of his childhood disintegrate and vanish.
Still, he was stunned to hear that those bays and bayous, with names like Yellow Cotton Bay and Dry Cypress Bayou that offered him nets full of shrimp and shelter from storms, would no longer appear on maps.
"It's really painful," Tayamen, 60, a shrimper in lower Plaquemines Parish, 40 miles south of New Orleans.
"You don't know where you're going anymore. You don't know which way to point."

 Photo provided by P.J. Hahn, Plaquemines Parish Coastal Zone Management Department

Locals like Tayamen have seen the slow death of Plaquemines' wetlands for years.
Over the past several months, cartographers at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration have made it official, removing 40 place names from official nautical maps.
Bays, bayous, rivulets and islands like Fleur Pond, Tom Loor Pass and Skipjack Bay have been erased from federal maps.
The reason: They're no longer there.

1891 USGS map of section of Plaquemines Parish, Louisiana including Pointe à la Hache.

(1939 USGS map of section of Plaquemines Parish, Louisiana including Ironton, Myrtle Grove and Pointe à la Hache.)

New maps are redrawn all the time with new features, said Meredith Westington, chief geographer at NOAA's Office of Coast Survey, which updates maps.
But having such a high number of removals in one place – all along Plaquemines Parish – is unprecedented, she said.
"This is the first I've seen it," Westington said.
"I don't know that anyone has seen these kinds of mass changes before."

The "Wagonwheel", an unusual circular pattern of canals just south of Yellow Cotton Bay, also owes its pattern to the combination of geology and extractive logistics. 

Here, the oil companies' canals depart from their typically linear vocabulary to follow the roughly circular limit of a raised salt dome.

The names – 40 and counting – will be stored in the historical record at the agency, she said.
But new maps will no longer show them.
The list got so high that Westington began keeping a running tab on her desk – the only place in the USA that she's needed to do that, she said.
A team of surveyors are still mapping the Gulf Coast and should be done later this year.
"It's a little disturbing," Westington said.
"It's sad to see so many names go."

The new maps document a disturbing trend Louisianans have witnessed for years.
The state has lost more than 1,800 square miles of its coastal marshes – an area larger than the size of Rhode Island – since the 1930s, due to sealing off the Mississippi River with levees to protect towns, natural subsidence and thousands of miles of transport canals carved out by oil and gas companies.

In another rare move, a New Orleans area flood control board filed a lawsuit last year against 97 oil and gas companies, claiming they should fund billions of dollars in coastal restoration projects for their role in wetlands loss.
Similar lawsuits by Plaquemines and Jefferson parishes followed.
Only a fraction of a $50 billion, 50-year state plan to restore the coast has been funded.

 Bays, bayous on Wikimapia map

The move to make oil and gas companies liable has been fought by Louisiana Gov.
Bobby Jindal, a Republican, who refused to re-appoint members of the flood control board involved in the suit.
Garret Graves, Jindal's coastal chief, didn't return several requests for comment.

 NOAA chart 1271 (1965)

Besides the transport canals – which allow saltwater to enter and erode marshes – Plaquemines has been battered by four recent hurricanes starting with Hurricane Katrina in 2005 and the BP oil spill, which infiltrated the parish's marshes, Plaquemines president Billy Nungesser said.
His parish alone will need about $1 billion to save it from vanishing into the sea.
NOAA removing names from maps was a wake-up call to how fast the crisis is mounting, he said.
"It makes it hit home how quickly we're losing the coast of Louisiana," Nungesser said.
"With a snap of the fingers, they're gone."

 A colony of brown pelicans on an island at Four Bayous Pass in Plaquemines Parish

The disappearance of those places was less of a surprise to Bradley Nezat, 49, a former fishing guide and current restaurant owner in Venice, La., at the southern tip of Plaquemines.
Years ago, taking a boat out to the gulf required motoring through stands of Cypress trees.
Today, all those trees are gone and each year the open water pushes closer to shore, he said.
"It took thousands of years to make this peninsula," Nezat said.
"It'll disappear much faster than that."