Satellite images to monitor ocean acidification in remote areas from space

Five years of global sea-surface salinity from space

Variations in 10-day mean sea-surface salinity derived from SMOS data

over a five-year period on a grid resolution of 0.5 x 0.5°.

Nicolas Reul (Ifremer)

From RT

A group of international researchers is developing "pioneering techniques" to monitor the acidity of oceans from space, using satellites that can orbit the Earth up to 700 km above us in hard-to-reach areas, like the Arctic, much faster than before.

 Scientists have used satellite data to map the alkalinity of the world's oceans for the first time.

The image above shows the average level of alkalinity over the past five years with blue marking water that is more acidic.

By using satellite data, scientists can obtain live information as the ocean changes

According to the scientists, a number of existing satellites can be used for the task, including the European Space Agency's Soil Moisture and Ocean Salinity (SMOS) sensor that was launched in 2009 and NASA's Aquarius satellite launched in 2011.

"Satellites are likely to become increasingly important for the monitoring of ocean acidification, especially in remote and often dangerous waters like the Arctic.
It can be both difficult and expensive to take year-round direct measurements in such inaccessible locations," said lead researcher Dr Jamie Shutler, of the University of Exeter.
"We are pioneering these techniques so that we can monitor large areas of the Earth's oceans allowing us to quickly and easily identify those areas most at risk from the increasing acidification," he said.

 Sea-surface salinity and ocean circulation

Average sea-surface salinity values.

Areas of red indicate regions of high salinity, and areas of green indicate regions of low salinity.

The map is overlaid with the simplified global circulation pattern called the ‘thermohaline circulation’.

The blue arrows indicate cool deeper currents and the red indicate warmer surface currents.

Temperature (thermal) and salinity (haline) variations are key variables affecting ocean circulation.

Each year, over a quarter of global CO2 (carbon dioxide) emissions from burning fossil fuels and cement production are absorbed by the planet's oceans.
This process makes the seawater become more acidic and as a result more difficult for some marine life to exist.
Growing CO2 emissions, along with the rising acidity of seawater, could devastate some marine ecosystems over the next century, ecologists warn, and that's why endless monitoring of changes in ocean acidity is vital.
A report issued before a United Nations climate summit in New York put 2014 world carbon emissions 65 percent above levels in 1990, despite repeated promises of curbs and a shift to renewable energies.
It said world emissions could reach 43.2 billion tons in 2019, with 12.7 billion from China alone, as the number one carbon emitter.

 Global salinity maps from SMOS (ESA/IFREMER)

Current methods of measuring temperature and salinity to determine acidity are restricted to in situ tools and measurements from research vessels.
Since such vessels are expensive to run and operate, the approach limits the sampling only to small areas of the ocean, however.

The groundbreaking techniques use satellite mounted thermal cameras to take ocean temperatures, while microwave sensors check salinity.
These measurements can be used to assess ocean acidification more quickly and over much larger areas than has been possible before, researchers say.

"In recent years, great advances have been made in the global provision of satellite and in situ data.
It is now time to evaluate how to make the most of these new data sources to help us monitor ocean acidification, and to establish where satellite data can make the best contribution," said Dr Peter Land from Plymouth Marine Laboratory, the lead author of the paper, set to be published on Tuesday in the journal Environmental Science and Technology.

Scientists from the University of Exeter, Plymouth Marine Laboratory, Institut français de recherche pour l'exploitation de la mer (Ifremer) and the European Space Agency took part in the research.

Links :

• GeoGarage blog :  Aquarius to Illuminate links between salt, climate / Satellite produces map of global salinity / ‘The other CO2 problem’: How acidic oceans will cost our economy billions / Acidifying ocean threatens California coast / An acid test for policy / Study: our oceans are so acidic they're dissolving snails / Google Earth tour of a more acidic world / Acid test / Ocean acidification : the other CO2 issue / Oceans failing the acid test, U.N. says

Maps provide another view of South Florida history

The government's first nautical map of South Florida (1855)

showed most of the development was south of the Miami River.

(NOAA Office of Coast Survey)

 South Florida in 2015 with the Marine GeoGarage

From Sun Sentinel by Ken Kayle

In 1854, six years before the Civil War, the U.S. government first mapped the South Florida coastline, primarily to mark the depth of shoreline waters and prevent ships from breaking up on rocks.
The map didn't show much other than obscure landmarks such as Turkey Point, a place that actually had turkeys, not a nuclear plant.
Over the decades, updated maps were produced, depicting the rapid buildup of the coastline and providing another view of history.
Now, you can see it for yourself, free of charge.
The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's Office of Coast Survey has put all its maps on its online site – historicalcharts.noaa.gov.

"You see the progression of coastal changes," said agency spokeswoman Dawn Forsythe.
"You can match them up and compare them with today's charts."
For instance, the 1855 map shows the bulk of South Florida's population was south of the Miami River, in what is now downtown Miami.
Aside from Virginia Key and Key Biscayne, most of the landmarks had unfamiliar names, such as Shoal Point, Black Point and Elliott's Beach.

 Here's the nautical map for Fort Lauderdale in 1895.

 Fort Lauderdale with the Marine GeoGarage in 2015

Four decades later, in 1895, a map indicated development was spreading north.
The Fort Lauderdale area is shown having two settlements, Lauderdale and Cocoa Palms, near what is now Sunrise Boulevard.
By 1927, Miami, Fort Lauderdale and West Palm Beach already were fairly well developed. However, Port Everglades still was Lake Mabel, three to six feet deep with a rocky bottom.
By 1951, maps show the entire South Florida coastline was burgeoning with cities, canal systems, ports, isles, bridges, tall buildings and docks.

That was the result of a land boom, said Debi Murray, chief curator of the Historical Society of Palm Beach County.
"The early 20^th Century was a period of huge growth because of the Flagler railroad and because people started selling lots like crazy," she said.
Something the maps don't clearly depict: How two Category 4 hurricanes, in 1926 and 1928, devastated the region for years.

The maps prior to those storms show South Florida's cities having simple street grids and little coastal development.
Yet by the mid 1930s, maps show Miami, Fort Lauderdale and Miami flourishing with swing bridges, a network of waterways, yacht clubs, radio towers and water tanks.
In between, the region suffered miserably, Murray said.
"The 1926 hurricane put the brakes on growth and widely affect the entire region," she said.
"The 1928 hurricane destroyed thousands of homes and killed between 3,000 and 3,200 people – and we were already in a local recession then."
What rescued the region was President Franklin D. Roosevelt's Works Progress Administration in 1935, Murray said.
"It put people to work," she said.
"We were also fortunate to have wealthy tourists keep spending money here."

Because the maps are nautical in nature, they show that as late as the 1920s the inland channels sometimes were as shallow as one or two feet.
Most were dredged to nine or 10 feet by the 1960s.
More recent maps provide bottom depths in much more detail.

 1855 U.S. Coast Survey nautical chart or map of Tampa Bay, Florida.

Centered on Passage Point, this map covers from St. Helena and Tampa south to Mullet Key and Palm Key.

Chart notes various triangulation points and the proposed site of a rail depot on the western shore. The city of Tampa is noted though, at this stage, development is minimal.

Countless depth soundings fill the bay.

To the left of the map, below the title, are detailed sailing instructions and notes on tides and shoals. This is one of the earliest Coast Survey charts to focus on Tampa Bay. 

The hydrography for this map was completed by O. H. Berryman.

The chart was produced under the supervision of A. D. Bache, of the most prolific and influential Superintendents of the U.S. Coast Survey.

NOAA's Office of Coast Survey, based in Silver Spring, Md., was established in 1807 at the behest of President Thomas Jefferson, who wanted nautical maps drawn to improve shipping safety and to help the young nation's military better defend itself.
"Knowing more boats were destroyed by accident than war, they decided they needed to do a survey of the coast," Forsythe said.
"The first charts came out in the mid 1830s. We've been doing it ever since."

Maps were not produced every year – in the 1800s and well into the 1900s, it could take five to 10 years to produce a single map of a region.
It was a painstaking process.
Survey teams would measure water depths by dropping a lead ball attached to rope over the side of a ship until it hit bottom.
Then they would move about 500 feet and do it again, going back and forth, like a "mower over a lawn," Forsythe said.
Then engraved copper plates and a lithograph were used to produce a map.
Despite that tedious process, in the past 180 years, the Office Coast Survey has accumulated 35,000 historical maps of the entire U.S. coastline, covering about 3.4 million square miles.
"Now cartographers sit in front of computers," Forsythe said.
"About 150 charts are updated each week with critical corrections, available digitally."
While the maps are mainly used by the marine community, they also have been used by movie production companies to ensure accuracy of sets for given time eras.
And the behind-the-scenes data used to compile the maps has been used to develop storm surge prediction models, Forsythe said.
She added that the maps make great gifts for history and marine buffs.
"They are really cool to sit there and explore. It's another way of looking at history," she said.

The Wedge : legendary backwash

Sunny morning in California by Alex Verharst

 
 Slow Motion Carnage

The Wedge with the Marine GeoGarage :
a surf break in Newport Beach CA that is known to be deadly.

The mystery of life

The mystery of life from Adil Schindler
 "Accept the pain and celebrate the joys"

On January 28th and 29th. two unusual events coincided at the legendary divesite of Roca Partida in the Eastern Pacific.

 Roca Partida with the Marine GeoGarage

The divers of the Mexican Liveaboard SolmarV encountered an unusually friendly humpback whale mama with her newborn who allowed them unparalleled close encounters underwater.

The next day 2 Orcas showed up at the dive site and executed natures plan of order.... 

Google Maps goes coastal with unmanned boat

A Street View Trekker mounted on an autonomous Wamv robot passes the Exploratorium.
and see the San Francisco Shoreline streetview imagery in Google Maps at maps.google.com/ocean. 

From SFGate by Kristen V. Brown

Recent visitors to San Francisco Bay might have spotted something strange: a small unmanned vessel zipping through the water with a mysterious sphere mounted atop its two parallel hulls.
“What is that?” one bystander asked recently, as the watercraft hugged the shoreline off of Fort Mason.
“Is it a water drone?” asked another.

For the past few months, the nonprofit San Francisco Baykeeper has been remotely piloting the craft — a catamaran topped with a loaner Google Street View camera.
In a teaming of tech and environmental advocacy, Baykeeper is using the camera’s 360-degree imagery to capture the shoreline’s rising sea levels, mapping a meandering 400 miles of the bay’s coast.
The idea is to give people a close-up view of the shore, the kind of view typically available only from a boat.
This, Baykeeper hopes, will rile them up.
“A lot of people know about sea level rise,” said Sejal Choksi, an environmental lawyer and Baykeeper’s interim director.
“We are hoping these images will really bring the reality home to the public, that they will look at pictures of places they know and say, 'Oh my gosh, this is going to be underwater.’”
Google’s Street View cameras have been affixed to cars, boats, people and even camels. But this catamaran, a Wave Adaptive Modular Vessel that keeps the camera steady even as the tide swells, is a first.

Learn more at http://wam-v.com/wamv_trekker.html

Baykeeper initially planned to use kayaks and GoPro cameras to document small parts of the bay. After Baykeeper won a $100,000 grant from Google, though, the Mountain View tech giant offered up its imaging gear.
The camera consists of 15 lenses atop a mast, each angled in a different direction to be stitched together to create a panoramic view.
The catamaran is battery-operated, and controlled via joystick from Baykeeper’s patrol boat.
“It’s basically a large-scale video game,” said Karin Tuxen-Bettman, a Google employee and wetlands-mapping expert who is helping Baykeeper with the project.

Baykeeper began mapping in October.
After more than 20 eight-hour days on the water, the organization has documented 300 miles of shoreline, including wetlands and deltas.
Already, the mapping expeditions have proven revelatory, said Ian Wren, Baykeeper’s staff scientist.
“We noticed in some areas the wetlands are just a few inches above high tide,” he said.
“That means they are at risk for flooding, which could destroy those ecosystems.”

Wren has also discovered abandoned ships at risk of polluting the bay as they rot.
Once the mapping is done, Baykeeper will display the images in interactive maps on its website. They will also be available through Google’s popular Street View tool.
“A lot of agencies talk about sea level rise, but there is not a lot of public input,” Choksi said.
“These kind of issues should be more community-based. They are local, regional problems.”

In addition to using the images to raise public awareness, the nonprofit hopes to establish a baseline against which researchers can measure sea levels in the future.
There is significant research indicating that the global sea level is rising now at a faster rate than in the past.
The Global Mean Sea Level has risen by 4 to 8 inches since record keeping began in 1880. (Sea-level rise is caused by two main things: thermal expansion due to the warming of the oceans and the melting of land-based ice such as glaciers and polar ice caps.)

Baykeeper is not the first environmental group to receive Google’s Street View technology.
Through Google.org, the company’s nonprofit arm, Google has lent its cameras to researchers studying the Galapagos Islands, Tanzania’s Gombe National Park and the Colorado River, among other locations.
Nonprofits, researchers and government tourism agencies can apply to borrow the device.

Tuxen-Bettman said she hopes to eventually work with local governments and nonprofits to map all of the waterways feeding San Francisco Bay.
It might be useful for planning purposes, like documenting infrastructure that might need to be replaced or repaired.
“We want people to see that this kind of information could really be useful,” she said.

Links :

• SiliconBeat : Google boat maps SF bay