Pacific Spirit Marine Institute
Friday, March 21, 2008
The White House’s proposed budget for fiscal year 2009 restored a bit of good news for 3 of 5 key climate instruments crucial in tracking earth changes. CERES, a sensor to measure the Earth’s radiation, another instrument that tracks solar irradiance and the OMPS-Limb instrument (Ozone Mapping and Profiler Suite) all received a sentence commute in the proposed 2009 budget.
The death sentence handed down to 2 other instruments intended to measure sea-surface temperatures and wind directions over the oceans were left twisting in the wind.
Given the fact that scientists, on a whole, generally behave in an unflappable manner hearing words and phrases such as; ‘alarm bells’, ‘borders on criminal negligence’,'devastating’, ‘grave jeopardy’ and ‘blinding’ do not evoke feelings of confidence in the future. Since blowing winds and sea-surface temperatures are two key ingredients increasing the dead zones in our oceans.
A panel of scientists at the annual American Association for the Advancement of Science held in Boston last month reported…Climate change is rapidly transforming the world’s oceans by increasing the temperature and acidity of seawater, and altering atmospheric and oceanic circulation…
In the past ocean dead zones could be attributed to fertilizers, farm run-off, and sewage which over fed phytoplankton which are eaten by bacteria when they die that use up the oxygen in the water. These dead zones in the past were more likely to be found in places where rivers run into the oceans like the Mississippi into the Gulf of Mexico, but more dead zones are being found in the open oceans.
We need to have more ability to observe these growing dead zones, not less.
Image NASA/Goddard Space Flight Center
Scientific Visualization Studio
Labels: AAAS, Global Warming, NOAA, NPOESS, Ocean, Phytoplankton, ocean dead zone
© 2009, Pacific Spirit Marine Institute.
Ocean Dead Zones Observation Left Twisting In The Wind.
