World Oceans Day : What’s working? Inspiring ambitious coalitions for the Ocean and Climate

From Huffington Post by José Maria Figueres

Important global challenges can be overcome by strong global coalitions.
That is exactly what happened at COP21.
Countries, with business and civil society as relevant players in the build-up to the Paris Summit, finally broke through years of slow progress to hammer out a global Climate Agreement.

www.worldoceansday.org

But what about the Ocean?
What about our 8th continent where life begins, covering 70% of the Earth’s surface?
In spite of its present degradation there are reasons to celebrate this year’s Oceans Day with renewed optimism.
Here are two reasons why this is so.

Firstly, recent years have witnessed growing global understanding on the importance of the Ocean within our planetary climate system.
Indeed the persevering work of many, including the more recent report of the Global Ocean Commission, points to the importance of moving towards a rescue package to recover the Ocean’s health.
To this point, early in 2015 the world agreed to give the Ocean its own Sustainable Development Goal (SDG 14) to strengthen its resilience and to take action to restore the health of marine ecosystems.

Secondly, the Paris Agreement on Climate Change pledges to keep average temperature rise below 2oC, with the aspiration of not passing 1.5oC.
This is vital for the future health of the Ocean, which is already suffering the chronic impacts of warming and acidification as a direct result of absorbing our excess heat and emissions.

This last point was evident during the Paris Climate Summit.
I was there to participate in the launch of the Because the Ocean alliance of countries and organizations calling for an end to the divide between Climate and Ocean.
Heads of State and Ministers from 22 countries signed this declaration, requesting a special report by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) on the ocean-climate interface, and a dedicated ocean action plan under the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC).

 photo courtesy of Jeff Williams from ISS

In 2016 we are already seeing results.
The IPCC has established its work program for the 6th Assessment Cycle, with the Ocean as a major priority.
It also announced the preparation of a new special report dedicated to interactions between climate, ocean and the cryosphere.
Our recommendations in Paris are becoming a reality!
After all, it is about time the Ocean was fully integrated into the climate field.
It captures and stores over 2 billion tonnes of CO2 every year, an entirely free service valued at around US$148 billion a year.
We cannot afford to lose the precious marine biodiversity that, as well as providing food and livelihoods is saving us by fixing this carbon, avoiding even more acute, faster climate impacts.

Therefore, after many years of abject neglect and willing abuse of the Ocean, I am hopeful these international processes are now working towards Ocean restoration and protection.
We will achieve an ambitious global coalition for the Ocean.
But it will take time.
While we work towards this goal, action must not wait.
In our individual nations, regions, companies, communities and homes we should all be taking steps towards a healthy Ocean.

Science is leading the way.
It is inspiring to witness the way that marine experts are expanding our knowledge and understanding of the Ocean, and increasingly influencing the decisions of governments, industry and consumers.
With today’s rapid communications, the lag-time between discovery and action is getting shorter.
As people learn more about the Ocean and our devastating impact on it, the mobilization of citizen campaigns and consumer influence over the fishing and energy industries, is growing.
Coalitions for change are coming together in our streets and shops as well as at world summits.
After years of fighting for the Ocean, this year I am celebrating World Oceans Day with more hope than ever before.
We have a long way to go, but we are beginning to sail together in the right direction!

Links :

• National Geographic :  On World Oceans day, a view from the top
• Medium : NSF World Oceans day
• The Guardian : New ocean map reveals health of seas and value of protecting them – in pictures

D-Day: the largest seaborne invasion in History

D-Day overlord map

From Maritime Executive

The Normandy landings on June 6, 1944, (D-Day) were the largest seaborne invasion in history.

The operation, codenamed Operation Neptune, began the liberation of German-occupied northwestern Europe from Nazi control and contributed to the Allied victory on the Western Front.

The amphibious landings were preceded by extensive aerial and naval bombardment and an airborne assault.

The landing involved 24,000 American, British and Canadian airborne troops shortly after midnight.

Allied infantry and armored divisions began landing on the coast of France at 06:30. 

 A LCVP (Landing Craft, Vehicle, Personnel) from the U.S. Coast Guard-manned USS Samuel Chase disembarks troops of Company E, 16th Infantry, 1st Infantry Division (the Big Red One) wading onto the Fox Green section of Omaha Beach (Calvados, Basse-Normandie, France) on the morning of June 6, 1944.

American soldiers encountered the newly formed German 352nd Division when landing.

During the initial landing two-thirds of the Company E became casualties.

Twitter WW2Facts

The target 50-mile (80 kilometer) stretch of the Normandy coast was divided into five sectors: Utah, Omaha, Gold, Juno and Sword Beach.

Strong winds blew the landing craft east of their intended positions, particularly at Utah and Omaha. While the weather on D-Day was far from ideal, postponing would have meant a delay of at least two weeks, as the invasion planners had requirements for the phase of the moon, the tides, and the time of day that meant only a few days in each month were deemed suitable.

Omaha Beach East map

The Army Map Service, an NGA predecessor, provided maps for the Normandy invasion

and throughout World War II. 

The Army Map Service, a DMA predecessor, met the challenge of providing maps for the Normandy invasion, as well as all of World War II.

During that time, the AMS operated 24 hours a day, six days a week and maintained a skeleton crew on the seventh.

It successfully met every mapping request worldwide.

During the four-year period, 1941–1945, the AMS prepared more than 40,000 different maps of all types. (example)

Many of these were maps of areas never mapped before, prepared and brought up to date by aerial photography obtained by Allied forces aircraft, flying bombing missions.

Normandy invasion required about 3,000 different maps with a total of 70 million sheets.

The total production of maps by the AMS during WWII was approximately 500 million sheets.

If stacked one on top of another, they would reach about 31 miles high, 134 times the height of the Empire State Building.

The men landed under heavy fire from gun emplacements overlooking the beaches, and the shore was mined and covered with obstacles such as wooden stakes, metal tripods and barbed wire, making the work of the beach-clearing teams difficult and dangerous.

Adolf Hitler placed German Field Marshal Erwin Rommel in command of German forces and of developing fortifications along the Atlantic Wall in anticipation of the invasion.

The Allies failed to achieve any of their goals on the first day. Carentan, St. Lô, and Bayeux remained in German hands, and Caen, a major objective, was not captured until 21 July.

Only two of the beaches (Juno and Gold) were linked on the first day, and all five beachheads were not connected until 12 June.

However, the operation gained a foothold which the Allies gradually expanded over the coming months.

Losses to merchant ships during the invasion were much lower than had been anticipated.

Many ships plied back and forth between English ports and the beaches at Normandy.

Some ships made as many as three trips in June alone.

 'Mulberry' artificial harbour in Arromanches (SHOM map with the GeoGarage platform)

The U.S. Naval History and Heritage Command describes how a modern, artificial port was built at Omaha and Utah beaches.

Armed Guards on some 22 merchant ships which were scuttled to make a breakwater played a vital part in the operation.

For days they endured the early fury of the German counter-attack and helped give fire protection to the forces ashore from their partly submerged ships. 

Normandy landing : first assault

source : DDay Overlord website

Carrying out the time-honored task of saving lives, albeit under enemy fire on a shoreline thousands of miles from home, the U.S. Coast Guard’s cutters involved in the invasion of Normandy saved more than 1,400 souls, but the day was also one of the bloodiest days in Coast Guard history.
German casualties on D-Day were around 1,000 men.
Allied casualties were at least 10,000, with 4,414 confirmed dead.

Links :

• BBC : D-Day: How was the biggest ever seaborne invasion launched?
• CNN : D-Day: Debunking the myths of the Normandy landings
• Chron : D-Day: The Invasion of Normandy in color photographs 
• BBC : Animated Map: Operation Overlord
• Mashable : D-Day weather map is most important in History (Weather support of the Normandy invasion)

Sentinel's first map of sea-surface 'hills and valleys'

 Retrieving this type of data is one of the most basic objectives of a space altimeter

From BBC by Jonathan Amos 

The EU's Sentinel-3a satellite has given a sneak peek at what will be one of its most fundamental products - a map of sea surface height anomalies.

Launched in February, the spacecraft carries an altimeter to sense the oceans' "hills" and "valleys".
It is basic information that is needed to track currents and eddies, inform ocean forecasts and track variability in climate-driven sea-level rise.
This first Sentinel-3a global map contains just one month's data.
The acquisition was made between 3 March and 2 April 2016.
Red shows (positive) areas where the sea surface is higher than the reference sea level, and blue (negative) areas reveal where it is lower.
Positive anomalies are normally associated with warmer waters and a deeper thermocline, with negative anomalies associated with cooler waters and a shallower thermocline.
The thermocline is the transition layer between warmer mixed water at the ocean's surface and cooler deep water below.
The "reference" against which Sentinel-3a is looking is the historical dataset gathered by satellite altimeters since the early 1990s.

 MonteCristo island, Tyrrhenian Sea on open web map for Sentinel2

www.sentinelmap.eu

Montecristo island with the GeoGarage
(IIM/Navimap nautical map layer)

Montecristo island viewed from the sea

Six-satellite set

Some of the big features immediately recognisable in the map are the Gulf Stream moving up the US East Coast and across the North Atlantic, the Brazil-Falklands Confluence Zone in the southeast Atlantic, the Benguela and Agulhas currents that hug the southern tip of Africa, and the Kuroshio current that sweeps east of Japan into the central Pacific.
Sentinel-3a joins five other space altimeters already in orbit that are contributing this kind of data. This number of instruments is unprecedented.
"The main reason you want so many space altimeters is to provide good sampling of mesoscale details," explained Dr Craig Donlon, the European Space Agency's (Esa) mission scientist on Sentinel-3a.
"Given the very narrow field of view which is at nadir (straight down), you only get to see a few km in width, depending on the sea state.
"With a series of altimeters flying in a constellation, you can improve the sampling of the global ocean. But you have to make sure that at least one of those altimeters is working as a reference. This one must be an accurate, well-monitored system, and a consistent system throughout the historical altimeter constellation as well.
"That's been the Topex/Jason series, soon to become Sentinel-6/Jason-CS in a few years' time. The reference altimeter orbit is a 66 degree (relative to the equator) orbit, that was chosen very deliberately because you minimise tidal aliasing, because as you can imagine, if you have tides in your signal it's very confusing."

 Catching sun glitter reveals coastal waves

This image was taken by the Copernicus Sentinel-2 satellite on 1 October 2015. It shows how reflection of solar radiation by the sea surface reveals the complex patterns of waves as they interact with the coastline and seafloor off the tip Dorre Island, Western Australia. 

Copyright contains modified Copernicus Sentinel data (2016), processed by OceanDataLab

But being in a 66-degree orbit means behaviour at the poles is lost.
That is where S-3a comes in.
It goes to much higher latitudes, enabling it for example to have a look at what is happening in the Arctic Ocean.
It is hard to overstate the importance of sea surface elevation to the study of the oceans.
Just as surface air pressure reveals what the atmosphere is doing above, so ocean height will betray details about the behaviour of water down below.
The data gives clues to temperature and salinity, and when combined with gravity information, it is possible to gauge not just current direction but speed as well.
The oceans store vast amounts of heat from the Sun, and how they move that energy around the globe and interact with the atmosphere are what drive our weather and climate systems.

 El Nino warmth suppresses the normally cold waters of the Humboldt current, boosting algal growth

(Copenicus/ESA) 

The sea surface anomalies map, processed by the French space Agency CNES, was released here in Prague at Esa's Living Planet Symposium - a conference dedicated to Earth observation.
Many of the talks are centred on data coming from the EU's new Sentinel satellites - the biggest EO project in the world.
Four spacecraft have now been launched, with many more to follow.
Esa's Earth observation director Prof Volker Liebig showed a recent image from the colour camera on Sentinel-2a.

This featured a giant algal bloom off the coast of Chile.
The bloom was powered by the warm waters brought to the eastern Pacific last year by the El Nino phenomenon.
"Twenty-four million salmon in fish farms died as a consequence of this event," he said.
"The El Nino led to warm water there; normally it is cold water. The industry was unprepared. Eight-hundred-million US dollars have been lost.
"We hope governments and industry will become more aware of these (Sentinel satellite) tools and use them in the future to be better prepared."

A multitude of services based on Sentinel and other satellite data is already available under the EU's Copernicus programme.

How Weather4D Pro does work from Copernicus Observer
Free and open access to Copernicus data: 
added value for smartphone applications : safer sailing with Weather 4D

Weather4D is one of the first smartphone and tablet applications to combine weather and ocean data.
The application is designed for marine navigation, and can calculate the optimal route (based on waves and wind, amongst other parameters) for a ship, sailing boat or fishing vessel using Copernicus products.

The success of the Weather4D app provides a credible testimony to the added value that Copernicus provides in the emerging e-navigation sector.

(see Copernicus observer)

The European-funded Sentinel series

• The Sentinels represent the world's most ambitious Earth observation project
• Sentinel-1: Radar satellite that can see the Earth's surface in all weathers
• Sentinel-2: Colour camera dedicated to study principally land changes
• Sentinel-3: Multi-wavelength detectors tuned to observe ocean behaviour
• Sentinel-4: High-orbiting sensor to measure atmospheric gases
• Sentinel-5: Low-orbiting atmospheric sensor to help monitor air quality
• Sentinel-6: Evolution of the long-running Jason sea-surface height series

What is the Copernicus programme?

• EU project that is being procured with European Space Agency help
• Pulls together all Earth-monitoring data, from space and the ground
• Will use a range of spacecraft - some already up there, others yet to fly
• Expected to be invaluable to scientists studying climate change
• Important for disaster response - earthquakes, floods, fires etc
• Data will also help design and enforce EU policies: fishing quotas etc

Links :

• GeoGarage blog : Sentinel-3 and the ocean carbon conundrum / SMOS satellite meets ocean monster / Satellites guide sailor from treacherous waters / Copernicus Sentinel-1 : making our seas safer / Earth observation enters next phase

Stress and effect on a vessel in severe weather conditions

Stress and effect on a vessel in severe weather conditions.

Recorded during passage from Suez Canal to Singapore, recorded in June 2008.

Haven

HAVEN from Les films engloutis

Short film about the exploration on breathhold of the biggest wreck in Mediterranean sea, by 3 world champions Guillaume Néry, Morgan Bourc'His and Rémy Dubern.

All the images were shot between 40 meters and 50 meters.