Saving Seafood

NOAA sends Saildrones on mission to track El Niño

September 9, 2026 — A quartet of uncrewed surface vehicles are navigating 1,500 miles to the center of a historic El Niño gathering strength in the eastern Pacific, on a four-month mission to collect data on the warm-water impulse altering global weather patterns.

Two orange Saildrone Explorer 23′ USVs sailed Aug. 21 from Honolulu, carrying meteorological and oceanographic sensors and rendezvousing  with two other Saildrones on a 6,000-mile round-trip mission for NOAA’s Pacific Marine Environmental Laboratory (PMEL) according to a summary from the agency.

“A monumental El Niño is knocking at the door,” said Michael McPhaden, former PMEL senior scientist now working with NOAA’s Cooperative Institute for Climate, Ocean, and Ecosystem Studies (CICOES). “We’re going to take a closer look.”

The USVs will steer courses through the Tropical Pacific Observing System, a multi-national array of data-collecting moored surface buoys that provide continuous, real-time hourly tracking of surface winds, air temperature, humidity, and upper-ocean temperature down to 1,640’. Argo floats collect ocean profiles down to 1.24 miles every 10 days.

Distributed throughout the array are drifting buoys measuring sea surface temperature and currents. Overhead, satellites track the drifters and capture surface observations across wide areas.

Read the full article at Workboat 

IUU vessel tracker calls on more countries to share Indonesia’s lead, share data

June 22, 2018 — Indonesia is a model that other countries should follow, according to a leading campaigner advocating for the sharing of fishing data to reduce illegal, unreported and unregulated (IUU) fishing.

By making its vessel monitoring system (VMS) data publicly available, the country has increased transparency, said Tony Long, CEO of Global Fishing Watch, who was speaking at the 2018 SeaWeb Seafood Summit. The Indonesian fisheries ministry, which has been battling illegal fishing in its waters, moved to share its VMS data in 2017.

Not enough countries exchange data, said Long, who wants countries to “bring data out into the open” so that vessels’ movements can be tracked and illegal fishing operators exposed. “Global Fishing Watch will take and share any tracking system,” he said.

More transparency is key to forcing vessel operators into more responsible behavior, argued Long.

“Why not reward the compliant operators when you can track them?” he said. “The worst actors will stand out by their lack of information and therefore appropriate punishments can be put in place.”

Global Fishing Watch leverages tracking systems like Oceana, Skytruth and Google as well as national systems to map global movement of vessels.

Long’s organization has also recently partnered with the US National Oceanic & Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) to track vessels using satellites the monitor lights at night. A screen grab from one such monitoring off the coast of Oman showed that AIS data is underreporting the number of vessels in the waters: The data based on the number of lights in the night sky suggested a far larger fleet at work.

Read the full story at Seafood Source