Nayyir Ransome builds relationships between the government and the people it serves to support the ocean. As Senior Analyst with Ocean Conservancy, Nayyir sees the power of small, incremental steps that lead to big impacts for people and waterways.
“I want to encourage people to start where they are. Start with your friends, your church group, your classroom”, Nayyir shared.
Nayyir started advocacy work when they were young, joining the Campfire Youth Legislature as a seventh-grade student in Broadmoor Middle School in East Baton Rouge Parish School System, a school that was closed in 2019. “I was one of the youngest people in the room. The bill that I proposed didn’t even make it out of committee. So, when it was time to come together on the floor and vote on all the bills that came out of committee, I decided that I was going to speak on every single bill that hit the floor, literally, all of them. I ended up winning Outstanding Legislator that year. This honor is given only to one legislator out of almost 500 young people from across the state. I still have the medal. I keep it on my desk lamp with all my other conference tags and medals. It reminds me how much impact a person simply speaking up can have. Whether or not the vote goes your way at that moment, someone is still listening.”
Nayyir got involved in Youth Legislature at a time in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, when many students were feeling unheard, anxious and facing physical displacement after Hurricane Katrina.
Remembering the day Hurricane Katrina landed
On August 29th, 2005, Hurricane Katrina made landfall in New Orleans. At least 1,900 people were killed in the storm and, due to medical and infrastructure complications, post-storm. The devastation of one of the deadliest hurricane seasons in United States history forced 650,000 survivors from their homes—some were never able to return.
“We were out of school for two weeks. Compared to New Orleans where many schools closed for months and others shut their doors permanently, this felt like a privilege. When we went back to school, there were 200 more students in the building. Many families from New Orleans were forced to move to temporary housing in Baton Rouge. Our school was one of many that saw a large influx of students from New Orleans where many schools were unable to reopen due to Katrina. There wasn’t enough space, services or support to handle that, and it became a tense environment for all of us.”
Nayyir’s family moved to Baton Rouge just one year before the storm. Coming from Philadelphia, one of the largest metropolitan cities in the country, Nayyir experienced an intense culture shock when adjusting to life in open-air, sea-centric Southern Louisiana. Nayyir reflected on the contrast of towering buildings and lightning-fast train transport to kids catching mudbugs from the crawfish mounds in the drainage ditches, designed to channel storm water, along roads without sidewalks.
“When I started participating in Camp Fire USA’s Youth Legislature program, I felt intimidated. It was a strange experience, grappling with my own sense of displacement while watching other kids being displaced on such a large scale due to Hurricane Katrina. I wasn’t from the area, but I was there, and I did understand how it felt to be pushed out, to feel discarded.”
New Orleans has a culture unlike any other place in the world, and this rich weaving of languages, ethnicities and histories creates an unshakable strength that still stands today. Yet, the crippling impacts of Hurricane Katrina can be traced through the yet-to-be-rebuilt homes in the Lower Ninth Ward and the reality of long-term health consequences and economic instability for many residents, even now, 20 years after the storm.
Hurricane detection is better than ever, thanks to NOAA
In 2005, the best hurricane detection science provided around a 48-hour warning. The people of New Orleans had less than 24 hours from the time the mandatory evacuation order was issued to when water began to spill over one of the levees.
When Hurricane Katrina developed into a Category 3 storm, receded and then reformed as a Category 5 storm, scientists, local officials and communities scrambled to keep up and spread information quickly.
“We didn’t know what was happening in New Orleans for three days. People with friends and family there were starting to panic.”
Now, thanks to the steady, decades-long efforts of organizations like the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), current predictive technologies can provide up to five days warning of extreme weather—enough time potentially to prevent storms from having the same catastrophic impact as Katrina. Yet, the question remains, ”Will we continue funding the hurricane forecasting systems we know are protecting our communities?”
Tell Congress to Protect NOAA Today
Take action to ensure Congress stands up for NOAA, demanding the agency be fully funded and fully staffed.
Understanding NOAA’s vital role during storm season
It might not be clear what NOAA does during hurricane season because much of their work is behind the scenes. The National Weather Service sits under NOAA, and NOAA scientists and professionals are key players in many of the long-term conservation measures, research and technology that prevent the most dire consequences of extreme weather. Their work includes projects that we may not think of as disaster preparedness and resilience, such as coastal restoration initiatives.
NOAA uses a variety of scientific instruments on crafts such as planes, saildrones and gliders to gather data from inside hurricanes. Long term ocean observations contribute to hurricane and weather models. This hurricane season we have an opportunity to speak up about the proposed cuts to NOAA and the vital resources we would lose if these budget changes are approved by Congress. Continuing to fund NOAA is one way to ensure ongoing improvements to weather forecasting, honor those lost to Hurricane Katrina and, in the aftermath, support the people of New Orleans today, as they rebuild and heal.
We can all speak up for life-saving hurricane detection and research
As storm seasons intensify, we need faster, more accurate weather prediction and storm detection more than ever. NOAA is America’s first line of defense against the deadliest impacts of natural disasters on our communities. Yet, NOAA’s funding is facing major cuts that, if enacted, will result in lives lost. We need to keep moving forward keeping in mind and heart the nearly 2,000 people who lost their lives during Katrina, the thousands more New Orleanians who lost their land and legacies, and the hundreds of thousands of people who are impacted by deadly storms in the United States each year.
Looking back, Nayyir can see how these experiences growing up in post-Katrina Louisiana shaped their advocacy and approach to community organizing.
“My time in Southeast Louisiana taught me a lot about people-centered advocacy. Even if we haven’t experienced something at its most extreme, we can find a way to understand the root of it by looking at our lives and the places we live. Ocean Conservancy has helped me to grow in how and why we must work across government agencies and lines to protect our ocean and the people who rely on it.”
Ocean Conservancy works alongside NOAA as a science-led advocacy organization mobilizing federal, state and local action for our ocean. Every investment in NOAA translates into vital seconds, hours and days of response time for communities when hurricane season strikes. The more data we can collect and use to predict the behavior and patterns of storms, the better we can respond and prevent tragedies.
Each year, storm season is intensifying from climate change—and not just on our coasts. Communities throughout the U.S. are affected by hurricanes and floods that threaten lives and livelihoods. We all rely on NOAA’s vital research and tools for weather prediction and extreme weather warnings. These services are a lifeline we cannot afford to lose.
Call on your Congress members today and insist they support full funding and operation of NOAA.
The post Honoring New Orleans 20 Years After Hurricane Katrina Means Protecting NOAA appeared first on Ocean Conservancy.
Honoring New Orleans 20 Years After Hurricane Katrina Means Protecting NOAA
By Qi-Fan Wu (Niels Bohr Institutet, University of Copenhagen)
During our journey, we saw many beautiful cloud patterns while looking outside the METEOR! Even though people do not always pay attention to them, clouds are among the most visible elements of the sky and naturally form part of our everyday background. And when we sailed away from the coastal region of Recife to the open ocean, the sky seemed to open up, allowing clouds to reveal their full variety and structure.
In climate modelling, clouds are one of the biggest sources of uncertainty. There is a famous saying in mathematics: “Mathematics is the queen of the sciences, number theory is the crown of mathematics, and the Goldbach Conjecture is the pearl on the crown.” The same idea can be applied to the study of clouds in Earth science. There is still no general macroscopic theory of clouds. Cloud physics is an absolutely fascinating topic, as it combines turbulence, stochastic processes, chemicals in the air, multiscale interactions within the Earth–atmosphere system, and a close connection to our daily weather.
In this blog entry, we would like to share some lovely photos of cloud patterns that we took on METEOR. Instead of serious systematic investigations, we focus on the basic cloud physics behind some typical cloud phenomena shown in these photos. These examples might provide something interesting to think about during our leisure time, even after returning to land. If nature is an artist, clouds are among its finest masterpieces, shaped by physical laws and stochastic processes.
What are clouds, and what is inside them? Clouds are made of many liquid water droplets and ice crystals inside the boundaries of the cloud. They are mostly air, with the many particles dispersed widely and more or less randomly throughout the cloud interiors [a]. The individual particles that make up a cloud are very, very small and not generally visible to the human eye.
When we look up from our research vessel METEOR and observe clouds, we first see their macroscopic structure: their overall shape, height, thickness, and organization across the sky. Broad, layered clouds often form through slow, large-scale ascent, while towering clouds with visible turrets reflect rapid rising motion in smaller air parcels. These visible forms are continuously shaped by moisture supply, cooling, turbulence, mixing with drier air, and precipitation, linking the large-scale atmospheric flow to the clouds we observe [a,b].
After leaving Recife, we entered a region typically influenced by the southeast trade winds of the tropical South Atlantic, where a vertically layered atmosphere, warm ocean conditions, and wind-driven mixing often promote a turbulent marine boundary layer. In Figure 1, the sky shows a layered cloudscape ranging from thin, high cirrostratus and altocumulus clouds to low cumulus and towering cumulonimbus clouds. These different forms reflect how the atmosphere organizes moisture, cooling, and vertical motion: broad layers are associated with gradual ascent, while the rising turrets of cumulus and cumulonimbus reveal stronger localized updrafts. Together, they illustrate the visible macroscopic structure of clouds, shaped by atmospheric motion and the microphysical processes occurring within them.
It should be noted that, in general, atmospheric temperature in the troposphere decreases with increasing altitude. Over the subtropical oceans, however, this is not the case. A relatively thin temperature-inversion layer lies above the subtropical marine boundary layer, within which temperature increases with height and the atmosphere is highly stable (Figure 2). Cloud occurrence above the marine boundary layer is relatively low in this region. The base of the trade-wind inversion is typically located at an altitude of approximately 1–2 km, separating the moist lower layer from the dry free troposphere [c].
This large-scale thermodynamic structure provides the environmental conditions under which clouds form and evolve. At the microscopic scale, however, clouds consist of particles: liquid water droplets, ice crystals, or a mixture of both. Clouds composed entirely of liquid droplets are commonly referred to as “warm clouds”, whereas clouds containing ice particles are classified as “cold clouds”. When liquid droplets and ice crystals coexist, the cloud is described as a mixed-phase cloud. However, the distinction between “warm” and “cold” clouds hinge on the phase of the particles, not on the temperature. The warm/cold distinction depends on the microphysical phase of the particles inside the cloud, which a normal naked eye observation cannot resolve.
Warm clouds consist of liquid water droplets spanning a range of sizes, from small haze droplets and cloud condensation nuclei to cloud droplets, drizzle drops, and raindrops (Figure 3). Cloud droplets typically form when water vapour condenses onto cloud condensation nuclei. Rainfall develops when some droplets grow much larger: larger droplets fall faster, collide with smaller droplets, and collect them. As a result, many small cloud droplets can combine to form fewer, larger drizzle drops and eventually raindrops [a]. This process approximately conserves the total liquid-water mass within the cloud, while transferring water from numerous small droplets to a much smaller number of large drops that are heavy enough to fall as rain.
Cold clouds contain ice particles, either alone or together with supercooled liquid water droplets [a]. Unlike liquid droplets, which are nearly spherical because of surface tension, ice particles can develop a wide range of crystalline shapes, including plates, columns, needles, dendrites, and aggregates (Figure 4). Their shape depends mainly on temperature and ice supersaturation during growth by water-vapour deposition. As ice crystals become large enough to fall, they may collide and stick together to form snow aggregates, or collect supercooled droplets that freeze on contact, a process known as riming. The regular hexagonal structure of ice crystals can also produce optical phenomena such as halos, which form when sunlight is refracted or reflected by suitably oriented ice crystals in high-level clouds as shown in Figure 3. In mixed-phase clouds, uplift supports the growth of ice crystals at the expense of supercooled droplets. Once sufficiently large, the ice precipitates and may melt into rain or drizzle while falling through the melting layer (Figure 3).
When we approached the equator, we saw many cumulus clouds with remarkably flat bases, marking the lifting condensation level where warm, moist air rising from the ocean cooled to its dew point and condensed into droplets. Similar temperature/humidity across an area leads to clouds sharing flat bases. Their uneven, towering tops reflected continued turbulence and convection above this level, revealing the active vertical mixing of the tropical atmosphere (Figure 5). As moist tropical air rises toward the cold-point tropopause, it encounters extremely low temperatures. When an air mass reaches a local temperature minimum, water vapour can freeze into very thin cirrus clouds (Figure 6).
After crossing the equator, we entered the Intertropical Convergence Zone (ITCZ), a band of heavy rainfall extending across the tropical Atlantic. Cloud organization within and around the ITCZ varies markedly from day to day. Extensive low-level stratocumulus clouds can also occur in the surrounding region, acting like a blanket that reduces the amount of incoming solar radiation reaching the ocean surface (Figure 7).
As we continued northward on our way home, we moved closer to the continent and witnessed some spectacular roll clouds, a very rare meteorological phenomenon. This type of cloud is known as “Morning Glory,” although evening land breezes can also produce roll clouds. The roll cloud is not attached to other clouds. associated with a solitary wave, a wave that has a single crest and moves without changing speed or shape.
As we were relatively close to the shoreline of West Africa, these roll clouds may have been produced by internal gravity waves propagating along a stable marine boundary layer [d]. The collision or sudden advance of a sea breeze or cold front can disturb the stable air layer near the surface, generating an atmospheric bore (a train of internal gravity waves). Such waves consist of alternating regions of upward and downward motion. Along the crest of the wave, moist air is lifted and cools to saturation, forming clouds, while behind the crest the air descends and warms, causing the cloud to evaporate. Because this cycle of ascent and descent extends along a long line of low-level convergence, cloud is continuously generated at the leading edge and dissipated at the trailing edge, maintaining a long, coherent band (Figure 8).
I think observing and thinking about clouds can be a nice hobby for enjoying the beauty of nature. Cloud processes are stochastic because nucleation and droplet collection do not occur at exactly the same time for every particle, even under the same environmental conditions [a]. Instead, freezing, condensation, and coalescence depend on chance microscopic events, so only some droplets become “lucky” and grow or freeze earlier than others. Perhaps cloud viewing could also give us good food for thought. After all, many cloud-related problems in climate modeling remain among the most beautiful mysteries in climate science.
Enjoy ~
References:
[a] Lamb D, Verlinde J. Physics and Chemistry of Clouds. Cambridge University Press; 2011.
[b] Levizzani, V., Kidd, C. (2025). Cloud Physics. In: Precipitation. Geophysics and Environmental Physics. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-97096-2_3
[c] Shang-Ping Xie. Subtropical climate: Trade winds and low clouds. In: Coupled Atmosphere-Ocean Dynamics. Elsevier; 2024. p. 139–163. doi:10.1016/B978-0-323-95490-7.00006-0.
[d] The Morning Glory and related phenomena. https://www.meteo.physik.uni-muenchen.de/~roger/AustralianProjects/TheMorningGlory/TheMorningGlory.html
By Naomi Krauzig (GEOMAR)
One of the most rewarding aspects of M219 has been contributing to the maintenance of the long-term GEOMAR mooring arrays that quietly monitor the tropical Atlantic year after year.
While CTD/LADCP casts and other shipboard measurements provide invaluable snapshots of the ocean, these anchored instruments provide something that cannot be obtained otherwise: continuous observations spanning minutes, days, seasons, years, and even decades. As an observational oceanographer, it is difficult not to appreciate the value of these datasets. They form the foundation for understanding ocean variability in regions that are critical for Atlantic climate variability and allow us to detect and quantify long-term changes that would otherwise remain hidden within the ocean’s natural variability.
Our first major operations took place off the Brazilian coast at 11°S, where the K1 to K4 moorings form part of a long-term observing system monitoring the western boundary current system and the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation (AMOC). Within just a few days, the four deep-sea moorings were successfully recovered, assessed, serviced, and redeployed.
Every recovery felt a bit like opening a treasure chest. After spending a year or more beneath the ocean surface, these instruments returned carrying an invaluable record of currents, temperature, salinity, oxygen, and other key ocean properties. It was incredibly rewarding to see how well they had performed. Nearly all instruments operated successfully throughout the entire deployment period, delivering high-quality datasets with remarkably few gaps.
From Brazil, we continued north to the equator at 23°W, home to another key long-term mooring at exactly 0°N. Since 2006, this mooring has been monitoring the Equatorial Undercurrent and the deep equatorial circulation from the surface to nearly 4,000 m depth. Its successful recovery and redeployment mean that this unique 20-year time series will continue, helping us better understand how the tropical Atlantic influences climate, oxygen and nutrient transport, and marine ecosystems across the basin.
Our final mooring destination brought us to the Cape Verde Ocean Observatory (CVOO), one of the flagship long-term ocean observatories in the eastern tropical Atlantic. Here, physical, biogeochemical, and ecological observations come together to track how the ocean stores heat and carbon and how marine ecosystems respond to environmental change. Like the moorings at 11°S and the equator, the value of CVOO lies not in a single measurement, but in the continuity of the multi-decadal record.
For me, one of the most memorable aspects was seeing how many people contributed to the success of the mooring operations. Careful planning laid the foundation, while having a dedicated person keeping track of every step ensured that everything ran smoothly (kudos to Anna Christina Hans, aka Tina!). On deck, crew, technicians, and scientists worked together like a well-oiled machine, stepping in where needed and solving problems on the fly.
The teamwork extended all the way back home to GEOMAR. Thanks to Rebecca Hummels’ mooring toolbox, data from several instruments could already be processed and checked while parts of the moorings were still in the water, providing an early look at the quality of the observations. On top of that, mooring experts were available around the clock to provide information, advice, and troubleshooting whenever needed. I believe the high success rate of the recoveries and redeployments is a testament to the experience, teamwork, and dedication of everyone involved.
With the major milestone of the successful mooring work behind us, another exciting operation was still ahead. Waiting in Mindelo was a brand-new surface buoy, ready to begin its own contribution to these invaluable long-term observations. Stay tuned to learn more about that deployment in a future blog post.
Keeping the Record Alive: Long-Term Ocean Observations in the Tropical Atlantic
By Joelle Habib (Laboratoire d’Océanographie Villefranche)
When you go on a scientific cruise, you always think about the instruments you’re going to deploy, the great data you’re going to acquire, or the experiments you’ll conduct. What you almost always forget is the small thing that isn’t actually small at all: food. And how are you going to eat it!
For those not familiar with scientific cruises: once you’re on board, most of your time goes to the science. You don’t really have time for food or food preparation. But there are always hidden heroes preparing your breakfast, lunch, and dinner, and, most importantly, the dessert for the dessert break. Today, instead of shedding light on the science, we’re going to talk about people, starting with the two chefs our lives basically depend on.
Rainer Götze and Peter Wernitz are the chefs of the last METEOR cruise. Rainer has been cooking on this ship for over 23 years, while Peter has been doing it for 13. Together they cook for 60 people on board, seamen and scientists alike. You’re probably wondering, like I was, how they pull it off. I had the chance to talk to them, and here are some of the ship’s secrets.
Let’s start with the planning. They don’t prepare the whole month’s menu before going on board, they plan it day by day. That said, a few dishes are practically law: fish on Tuesday and Friday, stew on Saturday (the stews are good, but it’s still my least favorite food day), and roasted meat on Sunday. Ice cream shows up for dessert on Sunday and Thursday lunches. And no matter the day, there’s always a vegetarian option on the table, nobody on board goes without something to eat.
So, all this cooking, but how many ingredients does it actually take? Let’s start with numbers. Every morning for breakfast there’s a choice of eggs (scrambled, boiled, fried…), pancakes, and more. So how many eggs are on this ship? For a one-month cruise, there are 3,000 eggs in storage, and the cooks go through around 90 of them a day. They also bake fresh bread every single day, about 3kg of flour goes into roughly 60 loaves. Coffee breaks happen all day, every day, there’s about 60kg of coffee on board. And since we’re on a German ship, and Germans do love their potatoes, there are 300kg of potatoes stored in a refrigerated, dark room so they don’t go bad.
You might be wondering why I’m talking so much about potatoes. Well, my dear reader, lunch has plenty of variety, but the one constant is potatoes. We’re on day 20 of the cruise, and I think we’ve worked through most of the varieties by now: fried, baked, soufflé, mashed, boiled and more still to come.
Another question I had was what happens if one of them gets sick. Rainer is a tough seaman who doesn’t get seasick anymore; Peter still does, occasionally. But either way, they’re always there, cooking through good conditions and bad. People generally love the food, though the chefs did tell me the one thing that never goes down well is old-school dishes like veal liver. (I can confirm.)
I think the message I’m trying to convey here is: a scientific cruise wouldn’t really be possible without Peter and Rainer. Science at sea is not only the science, but it’s also the work and effort of everyone on board. Especially the chefs!
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