We are excited to announce the launch of our new website: www.pacioos.org. In addition to pages addressing the needs of various user groups, pages have been created specifically for each of the PacIOOS subregions.
“Conditions at a Glance” are now available for each island group, allowing visitors to quickly locate up-to-date information on waves, tides, weather and more.
Be sure to use the “Feedback” button on the right side of each page to tell us what you think.
On Friday, March 11, 2011 a 9.0 earthquake 80 miles east of Sendai, Honshu, Japan generated the Honshu tsunami that devastated coastal communities in Japan.
Surging waves were felt throughout the Pacific, including Hawaii and the west coast of the U.S., damaging harbors and causing evacuations of coastal residents. Visit the PacIOOS Map Viewer for detailed surge run up heights from this and past tsunami events.
NOAA’s Center for Tsunami Research has created animations of the tsunami propagation, and models of maximum wave heights throughout the Pacific. The models are intended to estimate of wave arrival time, wave height and inundation area when a tsunami is generated.
The Pacific Islands Ocean Observing System has submitted three proposals for the continued development of PacIOOS. The first was a 5 year grant to NOAA for the continued core funding of our observing efforts. Read the PacIOOS Proposal here. The second proposal, to the NOAA Coastal Storms program, is for the capitalization and operation of two Waverider buoys in the Mariana Archipelago for 3 years. The third, in partnership with the State of Hawaii Office of Planning, proposes to grow the existing PacIOOS data management and visualization activities to support the development of a process that will guide future coastal and marine spatial planning in the State of Hawaii.
Drilling holes to mount mooring plates
Efforts continue toward installing a NOAA- funded Integrated Coral Observing Network (ICON) station in Laolao Bay, on Saipan, Commonwealth of the Northern Mariana Islands (CNMI). NOAA’s Coral Health and Monitoring Program’s ICON project is aimed at establishing a global, high quality in situ coral reef monitoring network and integrating near real-time in situ, satellite, radar, and other data for ecological forecasting in coral reef ecosystems. PacIOOS has partnered with CNMI’s Marine Monitoring Team and ICON to provide additional water quality and telemetry capabilities to this station.
Laolao Bay, Saipan, CNMI
Follow the progress on this and other activities in Laolao Bay here.
PacIOOS has purchased 4 receivers and 4 tags to deploy within the existing shark tracking array in Palau in partnership with both Coral Reef Research Foundation in Palau and the Australian Institute of Marine Science at the University of Western Australia, organizations that operate the existing array of shark tracking systems in Palau. The existing system is deployed at some of the most popular dive sites in Palau to look at the ecology and movement patterns of reef sharks. The work is a collaboration with the government and one of the tourist operators. The government of Palau has declared its waters a national sanctuary, forbidding the capture of sharks by commercial fishermen. Despite these good intentions, lots of illegal fishing is going on in its waters, much of it targeting shark fin. The monitoring efforts stem from the wish of the government and local tour operators to understand more about the ecology of these animals and to look at the effectiveness of the sanctuary they have in place. The addition of these receivers/tags will broaden the spatial extent of sampling efforts. Putting a bigger array in place in Palau would also serve another important purpose, because it would be able to monitor more than just sharks, including animals such as manta rays and dugong, a large marine mammal related to manatees.
The City and County of Honolulu (C&C) and PacIOOS have partnered to further the data management operations at PacIOOS and improve access to oceanographic data collected around Oahu. Annual funding, at fifty thousand dollars per year, for five years has been provided to PacIOOS to manage, store, and distribute C&C oceanographic data collected by contractors (University of Hawaii, Sea Engineering, and others) as well as by their regular water quality survey personnel. PacIOOS will also integrate C&C data into existing products and servers for public access.
The PacIOOS Governing Council, with representatives from various sectors including transportation, tourism, resource management, local and national government and non-government organizations, will meet in Honolulu, Hawaii on April 27, 2011. The purpose of meeting is to review Program progress towards milestones, discuss future priorities in light of federal funding uncertainties, explore PacIOOS priorities and future endeavors in light of President Obama’s National Ocean Policy (especially Coastal and Marine Spatial Planning and Regional Ocean Partnerships), and review the first draft of the PacIOOS Strategic Plan for 2011-2016. PacIOOS regional liaisons, communicators, and staff will meet on April 28, 2011, to review the existing data management and web product services in preparation for focused workshops in each PacIOOS jurisdiction over the coming months.
PacIOOS seeks an oceanographic specialist (OS) to join the Data Management team. The OS will integrate various data streams into useful data products and will closely collaborate with both scientists and end-users to determine product requirements. For more information and to apply for this position, visit www.rcuh.com.
