Ocean and Atmospheric Sciences

The Lamont community maintains a large research effort focused toward understanding the earth's potential for abrupt climate change, its causes, and its effects on humans. Abrupt climate change can include global warming as well as extreme cooling, drought or precipitation events. Paleoclimate research at Lamont focuses on how and why abrupt climate change events occurred in the recent past, sequencing the events leading up to abrupt changes. A joint observational and modeling approach continues to be a hallmark of abrupt climate change research at Lamont.

Aquarius is an underwater ocean laboratory located in the Florida Keys National Marine Sanctuary. The laboratory is deployed three and half miles offshore, at a depth of 60 feet, next to spectacular coral reefs. Scientists live in Aquarius during ten-day missions using saturation diving to study and explore our coastal ocean.

This website is designed to provide a portal through which scientists, resource managers, and the public can access information about our program and our partners.Our goal is to make our program completely transparent to the public, and to make products and data produced by the program readily accessible, including products from EPA researchers in our laboratories and centers, as well as from our grantees and collaborators.

The Hadley Centre for Climate Prediction and Research, which is part of the Met Office, provides a focus in the United Kingdom for the scientific issues associated with climate change. The main aims of the Hadley Centre are:To understand physical, chemical and biological processes within the climate system and develop state-of-the-art climate models which represent them; To use climate models to simulate global and regional climate variability and change over the last 100 years and to predict changes over the next 100 years; To monitor global and national climate variability and change; To attribute recent changes in climate to specific factors; To understand, with the aim of predicting, the natural interannual to decadal variability of climate.

The Ocean Studies Board was established by the National Research Council to advise the federal government on issues of ocean science, engineering, and policy. In addition to exercising leadership within the ocean community, the Ocean Studies Board undertakes studies at the request of federal agencies, Congress, or other sponsors, or upon its own initiative. The Ocean Studies Board explores the science, policies, and infrastructure needed to under stand and protect coastal and marine environments and resources.

The Ocean and Climate Change Institute: identifies the climatic effects of changing ocean circulation, develops an ocean-monitoring network to forecast climate changes, examines past records to expand understanding of ocean behavior, studies ocean dynamics that may trigger large, abrupt climate shifts, and evaluates the oceans response to the buildup of greenhouse gases.

The South Pole Observatory was established at the geographical south pole at 2837 m above sea level in 1957 as part of the International Geophysical Year. The National Science Foundation provides the infrastructure for the NOAA/CMDL scientific operations including a state of the art science building named the Atmospheric Research Observatory opened in 1996. Two CMDL observatory staff spend one year tours of duty at the station which includes a 9 month period of isolation and six months of darkness. The South Pole Observatory (SPO) is one of four atmospheric baseline observatories for NOAA's Climate Monitoring and Diagnositics Laboratory (CMDL). The Atmospheric Research Observatory (ARO) was built by NSF in 1997 to house current atmospheric research and replaced NOAA's Clean Air Facility in operation from 1977 to 1997. Atmospheric data has been collected from South Pole since the International Geophysical Year (IGY), 1957 - 1958.

The Samoa Observatory is located on the northeastern tip of Tutuila island, American Samoa, on a ridge overlooking the South Pacific Ocean. Established in 1974 on a 26.7 acre site, the observatory is the fourth of the CMDL Baseline Observatories. Since its construction, the Samoa Observatory has survived two major hurricanes with only minor damage. A staff of 3 operates the year around facility commuting to work. This Observatory has the distinction of obtaining 30% of its daytime power from solar panels.

Mauna Loa Observatory is located on the Island of Hawaii at an elevation of 3397 m on the northern flank of Mauna Loa volcano at 200 north. Established in 1957, Mauna Lao Observatory has grown to become the premier long-term atmospheric monitoring facility on earth and is the site where the ever-increasing concentrations of global atmospheric carbon dioxide were determined. The observatory consists of 10 buildings from which up to 250 different atmospheric parameters are measured by a complement of 12 NOAA/CMDL and other agency scientists and engineers.

Barrow Observatory, established in 1973, is located near sea level 8 km east of Barrow, Alaska at 71.32 degrees north. This facility is manned year around by 2 engineers/scientists who often commute to work in winter on snow machines. Due to its unique location, dedicated and highly trained staff, excellent power and communications infrastructure, the Barrow Observatory is host to numerous cooperative research projects from around the world. CMDL operates staffed atmospheric baseline observatories at Barrow, Alaska; Trinidad Head, California; Mauna Loa, Hawaii; Samoa; and the South Pole from which numerous in situ and remote atmospheric and solar measurements are conducted. The overall scientific programs and administrative functions of the four observatories are handled from Boulder with on-site station chiefs caring for day-to-day station activities. The meteorological data from each observatory is monitored, processed and put on the Internet on a daily basis by the Observatory Observations group. In addition to the baseline observatories, CMDL also has operations at numerous cooperative sites around the world.

The Atlantic Oceanographic and Meteorological Laboratory (AOML) is one of the Oceanic and Atmospheric Research (OAR) Facilities of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA). NOAA/AOML is a part of the US Department of Commerce (DOC) and is located in Miami, Florida. AOML's mission is to conduct basic and applied research in oceanography, tropical meteorology, atmospheric and oceanic chemistry, and acoustics. The research seeks to understand the physical characteristics and processes of the ocean and the atmosphere, both separately and as a coupled system.

Institute of Computational Mathematics and Mathematical Geophysics Siberian Division Russian Academy of Sciences
Head of the Laboratory: Dr. Viacheslav K.Gusiakov. Find the online Pacific Tsunami Catalog, 47 B.C. to present; online Atlantic Tsunami Catalog, 60 B.C. to present; online Mediterranean Tsunami Catalog 1628 B.C. to present; and others.

The International Coordination Group for the Tsunami Warning System in the Pacific (ICG/ITSU) was formed in 1968. The main purpose of the group is to assure that tsunami watches, warning and advisory bulletins are disseminated throughout the Pacific to member states in accordance with procedures outlined in the Communication Plan for the Tsunami Warning System. The ICG/ITSU is a subsidiary body of the United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization, Intergovernmental Oceanographic Commission (UNESCO/IOC). Its purpose is to recommend and coordinate programs most beneficial to countries belonging to the IOC, whose coastal areas are threatened by tsunamis.

The Institute of Global Environment and Society, Inc. (IGES) - a non-profit, tax exempt research institute, incorporated in the State of Maryland - was established to improve understanding and prediction of the variations of the Earth's climate through scientific research on climate variability and climate predictability, and to share both the fruits of this research and the tools necessary to carry out this research with society as a whole. The staff of IGES includes a dedicated group of scientists uniquely qualified to conduct basic research in these areas. Application of scientific knowledge for the sustainable development of society is an important objective of the Institute.

The Center for Ocean-Land-Atmosphere Studies (COLA), located in Calverton, Maryland, is a unique institution which allows earth scientists from several disciplines to work closely together on interdisciplinary research related to variability and predictability of Earth's climate on seasonal to decadal time scales. The scientific premise for research at COLA is that there is a predictable element of the Earth's current climate that makes it possible to accurately forecast climate variations. While the chaotic nature of the global atmosphere is known to impose a limit on the predictability of the state of the climate at a given instant, the hypothesis behind COLA's research suggests that there is predictability in the midst of chaos, and that accurate climate forecasts with lead times longer than the inherent limit of deterministic predictability are possible.

The NOAA Pacific Tsunami Warning Center in Hawaii issued an information bulletin at 8:14 p.m. EST Saturday, indicating that a magnitude 8.0 earthquake had occurred off the west coast of Northern Sumatra. Within a few hours of learning of the tsunamis that killed thousands in Indonesia Saturday night, Vasily Titov, associate director of the Tsunami Inundation Mapping Efforts, or TIME, at the NOAA Pacific Marine Environmental Laboratory in Seattle, Wash., and his counterpart in Japan had created preliminary model estimates of the event.

A program designed to reduce the impact of tsunamis through warning guidance, hazard assessment, and mitigation. A division of the US Department of Commerce and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA).

The PMEL Tsunami Reseach Program seeks to mitigate tsunami hazards to Hawaii, California, Oregon, Washington and Alaska. Research and development activities focus on and integrated approach to improving tsunami warning and mitigation.

NOAA Research organizations conduct basic and applied research on the upper and lower atmosphere as well as the space environment. Their findings form the basis for NOAAs contributions to major national and international environmental programs and agreements. For instance, the recent National Weather Service modernization is making use of NOAA research as evidenced by improvements in numerical modeling, information received from satellites and Doppler weather radars (NEXRAD) and sophisticated weather warning and display systems, all leading to improved severe weather forecasts and warnings. Other research programs focus on observation and study of the chemical and physical processes of the atmosphere, detecting the effects of pollution on those processes and monitoring and forecasting the phenomena affecting the Sun-Earth environment.

When they adopted the Convention, governments knew that its commitments would not be sufficient to seriously tackle climate change. At COP 1 (Berlin, March/April 1995), in a decision known as the Berlin Mandate, Parties therefore launched a new round of talks to decide on stronger and more detailed commitments for industrialized countries. After two and a half years of intense negotiations, the Kyoto Protocol was adopted at COP 3 in Kyoto, Japan, on 11 December 1997. Find here background materials on the science and politics of climate change, the text of the Kyoto Protocol, the Status of Ratification, and Compliance documentation.