Tag: National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration

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Katie Sard: Introductory Post, July 3, 2013

NOAA Teacher at Sea
Katie Sard
25 days until I am aboard the NOAA Ship Rainier
July 29 – August 15, 2013


Misson: Hydrographic Survey
Geographical area of the cruise:  Alaska Peninsula
Date:  July 3, 2013

 

Personal Log

Hello from Newport, Oregon!  I cannot begin to explain how excited I am for my upcoming Teacher at Sea (TAS) experience on the NOAA Ship Rainier. I have the privilege of working in a coastal community at Isaac Newton Magnet School (INMS) here in Newport.

Yaquina Bay Bridge
Although I don’t typically get to walk across the bridge each day on my commute, this is me as I made my way over the Yaquina Bay Bridge for the first time by foot!

I teach Integrated Science to blended classes of 6th, 7th, and 8th grade students.  My daily drive to work consists of looking out across the Pacific Ocean and passing over the Yaquina Bay Bridge.  My students are one of a kind, and their budding interests in science motivate me to continue my own scientific education.

I moved to Oregon in June of 2011 with my husband so that he could pursue a PhD position at Hatfield Marine Science Center through Oregon State University.  We moved here from Chautauqua County in Western New York State.  Although I grew up on the “East Coast”, it wasn’t until moving to Oregon that I really began to appreciate our Ocean and what it means to be a member of a coastal community.  Ever since our move I’ve been on a mission to discover all that I can about the Ocean in order to help my students appreciate what an amazing resource it truly is.  While I was attending a teacher workshop recently, I read the following quote by David Sobel that said, “Give children a chance to love the earth before we ask them to save it.”  The demands of the upcoming generations are enormous, and I am dedicated to making sure that my students grow to be scientifically literate citizens of our world.  I know that my TAS experience will help me to help my students love their planet!

The NOAA Teacher at Sea program is giving me the opportunity to continue my scientific education, and to bring my knowledge back to my students, colleagues, and community members.  The ship’s mission will be to do hydrographic surveys out around the Shumagin Islands, and in and around Cold Bay on the Alaska Peninsula.

NOAA Survey Plans
Here is a map that I found to help me understand where exactly I will be visiting.

I’m nervous, excited, and eager for my journey to start as I’ve never been on a ship of this size, and I’ve never been out on the ocean for this duration of time.  Be sure to check out the link to the Ship to get more information on the NOAA Ship Rainier.

In the upcoming month before my cruise I will be traveling back to my home town in New York with my husband Nick and my dog Luna.

Lost Creek State Park
My husband Nick, my dog Luna, and myself at Lost Creek State Park near our house in Newport.

We will spend several weeks there before heading back cross-country on the 40+ hour road trip.  The next time you hear from me will be when I am aboard the NOAA Ship Rainier!  I hope that you help to shape my experience by interacting with my via this blog while I am aboard the ship!

Did You Know?

  • The NOAA Ship Rainier is named for Mount Rainier which is the tallest peak in the state of Washington.  It is the fourth tallest peak in the United States.

Here are a few interesting fishermen’s superstitions that I will keep in mind as I begin my journey:

  • It is bad luck to look back once your ship has left port.
  • It is said that disaster will follow if you step onto a boat with your left foot first.
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Avery Marvin: Excited for this upcoming adventure! July 1, 2013

NOAA Teacher at Sea
Avery Marvin
(Almost) Onboard NOAA Ship Rainier
July 8–25, 2013

Mission: Hydrographic Survey
Geographical area of cruise: Shumagin Islands, Alaska
Date: July 1, 2013

Greetings from the Oregon Coast! Thank you for visiting my blog, and I hope you continue to follow me this summer throughout my 18-day Alaskan adventure aboard the NOAA ship Rainier. I am elated and honored to be a NOAA Teacher at Sea—an experience that will undoubtedly shape me and my classroom instruction for years to come.

NOAA Ship Rainier
NOAA Ship Rainier

My name is Avery Marvin and I am a middle school General Science and high school Biology teacher at Taft 7-12, a mid-size public MS/HS in Lincoln City, on the Oregon coast. I moved here just one year ago, and have been discovering the unique facets of living and teaching in a coastal community ever since.  I continue to be amazed and inspired by the natural surroundings and marine resources (i.e. the NOAA base in Newport, Hatfield Marine Science Center) at my fingertips. Knowing I am New York native, many of my students have quizzically asked me, “Ms. Marvin, why did you move here?” My hope, then, is that through this NOAA experience, I will be further able to inspire and show kids that “here” is a pretty amazing place to be—not just in terms of its natural beauty but its ecological and research significance moreover. With this awareness and education, students hopefully will feel a greater sense of ownership of—and thus appreciate and actively protect—the greatest resource in their very backyard: the ocean.

Diving in Tasmania
Avery dives in the chilly waters of Tasmania, Australia

As an avid adventurer and ocean-goer, I have explored many waters both as a conservationist and a recreationist (i.e. scuba diver, fisherwoman). Yet Alaska is a place I have dreamed of visiting for most of my life, and to be able to combine my experience with like-minded scientists conducting vital ocean research is truly awesome to me.  The Rainier, homeported at the NOAA Marine Operations Center – Pacific in Newport, Oregon, is a hydrographic surveying ship whose primary focus is mapping the sea floor in coastal areas.  The depth data collected on the Rainier is used to update nautical charts. This is crucial work as commercial shippers, passenger vessels and fishing fleets rely on accurate nautical maps to safely traverse various ocean passages.  In the case of Rainier’s work in Alaska, some of the terrain is being surveyed for the first time. Rear Adm Gerd Glang, director of Coast Survey, sums it up best, “Simply put, we have better maps of the moon than of our oceans.”  Several multi-beam sonar systems located on the Rainier as well as on a few smaller launch boats are employed to acquire this mapping data.  This six-minute video  gives a good overview of the mission and daily operations of the Rainier.

My 18-day journey begins on July 8, 2013 in Kodiak, Alaska, where I will be meeting up with the Rainier.  From Kodiak, we travel southwest to the Shumagin Islands, where the majority of the research on this leg of the trip will be conducted. We will then conclude our journey back in the Kodiak port. (Track Rainier’s movement here.) I can’t wait to dive in and absorb all that I can. I am particularly looking forward to working with and learning from all the scientists onboard, seeing the majestic Alaskan landscape and understanding how survey data can be used for mapping vital fisheries habitats.

I hope you will ‘virtually’ join me aboard the Rainier, this summer, and be a witness to some incredible scientific research.  This blog will be updated weekly with interesting stories, pictures and lots of newfound information about our mission at sea.  So check back often and feel free to leave comments and questions for me. If I don’t know the answer, I will ask a brilliant scientist to help me.

“For most of history, man has had to fight nature to survive; in this century he is beginning to realize that, in order to survive, he must protect it.” -Jacques-Yves-Cousteau

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Amie Ell: Preparing for an Adventure, June 26, 2013

NOAA Teacher at Sea
Amie Ell
Aboard NOAA Ship Oscar Dyson (Ship Tracker)
June 29 — July 18, 2013

Mission: Walleye Pollock Survey
Geographical Area: Kodiak, Alaska
Date: June 26, 2013

Personal Log

Amie Ell, NBCT Columbia High School White Salmon, WA
Amie Ell, NBCT
Columbia High School – White Salmon, WA

Hello everyone!  Thank you for visiting my blog.  I hope you continue to follow my journeys this summer.  Please allow me to introduce myself. My name is Amie Ell.  I am a teacher of sciences and mathematics at Columbia High School in White Salmon, WA. I live across the beautiful Columbia River in The Dalles, Oregon with my husband and two daughters.  I have taught for 10 years, 8 of them with my wonderful CHS clan!  I teach Physical, Earth, and Space Sciences as well as Algebra to primarily 9th graders.

This Friday I will fly to Kodiak to meet the crew of the Oscar Dyson and begin my adventure.  I was elated to learn that I had been chosen to be a part of the NOAA Teacher at Sea program and assigned to the Oscar Dyson. I had hoped that I would be given the opportunity to visit Alaska.   I have traveled to and explored many tropical ocean waters, but this will be my first Alaskan experience.  The commanding officer tells me that “…This Gulf of Alaska Pollock survey is one of the best ways to see the remote coastline of Alaska and to experience one of its foundation industries from a research perspective…”

The NOAA Ship Oscar Dyson (photo courtesy of NOAA)
The NOAA Ship Oscar Dyson (photo courtesy of NOAA)

I have learned that I will be helping with a survey of the Alaskan walleye pollock.  The main source of fish for many fast food fish sandwiches,  fish sticks, and even your imitation crab meat is the walleye pollock.  It is very important for scientists to maintain a careful watch on these fish so that their populations are not decimated by overfishing.

Please leave questions and comments for me.  I would love to hear from you all.  I know I will be missing home, friends, family, and all “my kids” at Columbia High.  Check back often.  I will always try to investigate and answer any questions you have.  Let’s begin our communication with a little survey:

Did You Know?  NOAA’s Pacific Marine Operations Center is located in Newport, OR.  Nine ships are serviced here including the Oscar Dyson.  Many of you have visited the Oregon Coast Aquarium in Newport.  Next time you are there, see if you can spot this NOAA hub.

NOAA Pacific Marine Operations in Newport, OR. (photo courtesy of NOAA)
NOAA Pacific Marine Operations in Newport, OR. (photo courtesy of NOAA)
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Elizabeth Nyman: Tropical Storm Andrea Edition, June 6, 2013

NOAA Teacher at Sea
Elizabeth Nyman
Aboard NOAA Ship Pisces
May 28 – June 7, 2013

Mission: SEAMAP Reef Fish Survey
Geographical Area of Cruise: Gulf of Mexico
Date: June 6, 2013

Weather Data:
Wind Speed: 19.97 knots
Surface Water Temperature: 27.78 degrees Celsius
Air Temperature: 28.40 degrees Celsius
Barometric Pressure: 1010.40 mb

Science and Technology Log

The Pisces is on its way to port, having had to suspend operations in wake of the bad weather that has since become Tropical Storm Andrea. We were supposed to go into Mayport Naval Base, right outside of Jacksonville, FL, but due to the storm we have been redirected to Port Canaveral.

Ocean
It’s been pretty rough out there! (Picture courtesy Ariane Frappier)

Despite all of this, we made the best of a bad situation. Even though we couldn’t do fishing or camera drops yesterday, we did still manage to get some data. We spent as much time as we could mapping the seafloor before we had to dodge the storm, and we took the time in the morning to do an XBT, an Expendable Bathythermograph.

You can use an XBT to get a temperature and depth reading for the water without having to actually stop the ship. A tube with a probe on it is attached to a launcher and is fired into the water. The probe has copper wire attached to it to send the data back to the ship.

So…you drop the probe, you get the readings, and at least you get some data even if you can’t stop the ship to send more delicate equipment down.

XBT
Launching probe…

Other than that, the past couple of days have been all about cleanup and dodging the storm. To a certain extent that makes the scientific posts a little quieter than usual, but it’s been a very interesting experience watching everyone work together to make sure that the scientists could get as much work done as possible without endangering the ship or its crew.

We didn’t get to do everything that we wanted to do on this leg of the trip, unfortunately. But we still got a lot accomplished, and I feel like it was just as interesting to see how everyone was able to react to the weather and still get their job done.

Personal Log

Whew! I didn’t imagine when I got on the Pisces in Tampa that I’d spend the last bit of the trip dodging the first named Tropical Storm of the Atlantic hurricane season. But I definitely have a greater appreciation that, with science as in all things, sometimes life does not go quite to plan.

If all goes to schedule, I will be leaving the Pisces tonight, for our detour into Port Canaveral. We had to stop working a day early, and we’ll end up arriving a day early and into a different port. My last day has mostly been spent trying to rearrange for my travel home from a new city and with assisting the science crew in cleaning up the lab spaces.

All data collection requires a certain amount of flexibility. I knew that already – social science data is notoriously difficult to collect – but the problems that I face in my work are quite different from these. When international relations scholars have trouble with data, it’s usually because of things like difficulties in getting governments and/or people to tell the truth, etc. But sometimes, as now, it’s because conditions make it unsafe to collect the data. We can’t send people into shooting wars to count casualties, and we can’t send scientists into a hurricane to count fish.

Science is a method, not a subject, and the scientific method is one wherein we all simply do our best with what we have. Science has been so profoundly influential because of the simple power of this process, testing over and over what we think to be true, so that we can learn if we are wrong. It’s true if you study fish, if you study policy, or if you study anything in between.

There are many things we’ve discovered about our oceans, and the fish and other creatures that inhabit them. But there are still many more things to learn. I’m glad that we have scientists like the ones I met on the Pisces out looking for our fish, and glad that NOAA, in conjunction with states and other government agencies like the Coast Guard, are looking out for our oceans.

My thanks go out to the entire crew of the Pisces, and the great people at the Teacher at Sea program, for letting me be a part of the process.

Did You Know?

NOAA is predicting a highly active hurricane season for the Atlantic this year. Stay safe!

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Elizabeth Nyman: The Science Continues, May 31, 2013

NOAA Teacher at Sea
Elizabeth Nyman
Aboard NOAA Ship Pisces
May 28 – June 7, 2013

Mission: SEAMAP Reef Fish Survey
Geographical Area of Cruise: Gulf of Mexico
Date: May 31, 2013

Weather Data:
Surface Water Temperature: 24.55 degrees Celsius
Air Temperature: 25 degrees Celsius
Barometric Pressure: 1016.3 mb

Science and Technology Log

Work continues here on NOAA Ship Pisces. By the end of today, we’ll have sent the camera array down to 35 spots and caught at least 45 fish with the bandit reels. I’ve personally gotten to see some of the camera footage, as well as help the scientific crew with their analysis of the fish we caught.

Fish
Here’s a screen capture of some video taken yesterday from the Florida Middle Ground. The big fish on the left is a red grouper, the fellow poking his head up with the crazy eye is a spotted moray eel, and the yellow fish not far above him are reef butterfly fish. Note that “crazy eye” is not a scientific term. (Picture courtesy of NOAA.)

This work goes on for the entirety of daylight hours, beginning with our arrival at the first location sometime between 7 to 7:45 a.m., and not ending until around 6:30 to 7 p.m. It’s a long day, with 8-10 drops of the camera array and 4 different attempts to catch fish with the bandit reels. But the Pisces doesn’t sleep just because the sun goes down. When most of the ship goes to bed, the crew continues scientific work by driving the ship around in circles. The circles are actually well-plotted lines, and the route is chosen to allow the ship’s ME70, a multi-beam sounding unit, to map the sea floor.

Map
Here’s an example of the routes we do at night. It will take all night to do one of these three blocks pictured here. (Picture courtesy of NOAA.)

Every possible moment of time is devoted to gathering as much data as possible, whether it’s fisheries data from the camera array and the bandit reels, or the mapping data that goes on at night. It’s expensive and time consuming to send a ship out here, 60-80 nautical miles off the west coast of Florida, and so everyone has to work hard while we’re out at sea. I have nothing but admiration for the entire crew of the Pisces, from the officers to the scientific crew to the deck crew, stewards, and ship’s engineers, because they all are always hard at work making NOAA’s scientific mission possible. But you might be wondering, what’s the point of all this? Why are we out here taking pictures and video of fish, and catching them to take back to the lab for testing?

This voyage is part of the SEAMAP Reef Fish Survey, which has been going on for over 20 years. The point is to gather information on the abundance of certain species of fish, which is why we need to see how many there are down there, through the cameras, and what their size, age, and fertility look like. This crew is based out of Pascagoula, MS, and that’s where the video taken of the fish is analyzed. They determine how many fish are present, and can actually measure the size of the fish by taking pictures with stereo cameras and using parallax, the difference in position from one camera to the next. They combine this data with the information that the Panama City lab generates from the ear bones and the sex organs, as well as any relevant external data from fishery observers and the like, to create a full a picture as possible about the overall health of the fish population.

Looking at numbers
Ariane Frappier, graduate student volunteer, examines NOAA reef fishery data from the Dry Tortugas for her thesis.

Cool. I like gathering data, and I definitely think that more knowledge of our fish and oceans is better than less. But we aren’t looking at fish out here just to look at fish, as awesome as that would be. This survey has a purpose. Data collected here is used by the SEDAR program, which stands for Southeast Data, Assessment, and Review. SEDAR will examine a particular species and analyze all the data collected about that species, before holding a series of workshops open to the public about that fish. At the end of the process, a series of experts will recommend how much fishing should be allowed for that population, in order to properly manage the fishery and prevent overfishing.

Personal Log

What we don’t get to record in our data, but is still pretty awesome, is the ability to view wildlife from the boat. I don’t mean the stuff we catch, though that’s pretty cool too, but the creatures that we just get to observe.

Me and Shark
Okay, some of the stuff we catch is really cool. This is me with a silky shark.

So far, I’ve seen loggerhead sea turtles, just kind of relaxing and swimming not too far from our boat. I also got to see a pod of Atlantic spotted dolphins – I saw several of them, but the way they were swimming around in the waves, it’s hard to be precisely sure how many. I missed seeing at least two other dolphins – the seas have been kind of choppy, and so they disappear from view pretty quickly.

Atlantic Spotted Dolphins
Atlantic Spotted Dolphins swimming very near the Pisces.

Then, pretty much right as I was writing this up, I got to see a leatherback sea turtle who surfaced for air pretty close to our boat. I didn’t get a picture, since you pretty much have to have the camera in hand for these things, they happen so quickly.

Sea turtle
So here’s a picture from NOAA for you. The zoom on my camera’s not that good anyway. (Picture courtesy of NOAA.)

Did You Know?

The leatherback sea turtle is an Appendix I creature under CITES, the Convention on International Trade of Endangered Species of Wild Flora and Fauna. Appendix I creatures are those at risk of extinction, and international trade in these species or any part of these species is forbidden.