Forecasting sea temps, far in advance

Wouldn’t it be great if we could check on water temperatures weeks before we even head to the beach?

That could soon become a reality, says Josh Kohut, a physical oceanographer at Rutgers University. 

Kohut and others in the Mid-Atlantic Regional Association Coastal Ocean Observing System, are trying to make this happen. 

“What we’re doing is we’re bringing in all these different tools that allow us to measure all these different parameters about the ocean, including temperatures, and we’re putting those into models to try to predict what ocean temperature will be.”

It’s something the MARACOOS group calls “integrated ocean observing.” 

“So the same way that you or I, when we look at planning what we want to do this weekend, we go look at a weather forecast,” he says. “We want to do the same thing for the ocean. We can actually look and say ‘Oh, well, here the upwelling is going to be a bit stronger or weaker, so we’ll know what the beach temperatures in the ocean will be for that weekend.'” 

To hear more about Kohut’s research on the local and global oceans, check out his full interview with Pulse host Maiken Scott.