NIWA seabird ecologist Dr David Thompson says while seabird tracking research has not been carried out for all albatrosses and large petrels in New Zealand, we know that several species also spend time in Chile and Peru, in Japan and the USA in the north Pacific Ocean, while others visit Namibia and South Africa.

The reason that both storms have been so strong and so late is that both the Pacific and Atlantic oceans have stayed warm this year, says John Knaff, a meteorologist at NOAA’s Cooperative Institute for Research in the Atmosphere at Colorado State University.

John Brosnan waits on board the RV Kaharoa after returning to New Zealand from an epic 75-day voyage.NIWA has deployed more than 1100 Argo floats in the Pacific, Indian and Southern Ocean over 22 voyages since 2004, more than any other individual vessel.

A network of state-of-the-art tsunami buoys is being deployed from New Zealand up into the Pacific to keep communities safer.Every 15 seconds the BPR records the height of the ocean above it and sends that information to the surface buoy once an hour.

Eel larvae face a long journey from their spawning grounds in unknown parts of the Western Pacific Ocean to the freshwater rivers and streams of New Zealand where they spend most of their lives.

For now, they’re looking back in time, working to see how accurately their model captures heat waves globally and in the various seasons, and whether it accurately represents the high and low pressure systems created by the MJO.In North America, says Julie Caron, an associate scientist at the center’s Climate and Global Dynamics Lab, the oscillation causes high-pressure systems that block the movement of cooler air from the Arctic or the Pacific Ocean.

NIWA freshwater scientists are pinning their hopes of solving an age-old mystery on 10 female longfin eels who are about to begin an epic journey to their spawning grounds somewhere in the Pacific Ocean.

Dr Egan and her team will be studying the ear bones of glass eels to learn more about their spawning locations and larval oceanic movements. In this new project, migrating female eels will be tagged and their location communicated to satellites to help pinpoint their spawning grounds in the western Pacific Ocean.

Future booms are estimated to cost about $5.8 million each.Major sponsors include Marc Benioff, the chief executive of Salesforce.com, and Peter Thiel, the co-founder of PayPal.Skeptics questioned whether this was the most economically efficient way to address the problem.“I fully agree that this is not the full solution to plastic pollution,” Mr. Slat said.While it’s necessary to prevent more plastic from entering the ocean, what is there already isn’t going to go away by itself, he added.“We have to clean it up at some point in time and, actually, I would say the sooner the better,” he said.

On that day, huge plumes of smoke drifted over North America and Africa, three different tropical cyclones churned in the Pacific Ocean, and large clouds of dust blew over deserts in Africa and Asia.