Marine applications of HCMM satellite data

Results of a limited comparison of HCMM sea surface temperature data with in situ data suggest that the HCMM data can provide a rather accurate representation of the sea surface temperature and temperature pattern. In the Nantucket Shoals region, the HCMM analysis provided data on the surface heating and on transport south of Nantucket Island and Nantucket Sound. The analyses also revealed the sea surface temperature structure of an anticyclonic warm ring

The Nantucket Quakers\u27 Message as an Alternative to Benjamin Franklin\u27s Message to the French Revolution

Benjamin Franklin lived in France from 1778 to 1785. He was successful in drawing the country into the American Independence war against Britain in 1778. He became the idol of future French revolutionaries, and remained so even after his death in 1790. The French revolutionaries also admired American Quakers, but they mistook Benjamin Franklin for a Quaker, which he was not. From 1786, American Quakers from Nantucket settled down in Dunkerque, in France. In February 1791, together with Jean de Marsillac, a French Quaker from Congenies, they brought a petition in favour of a non-violent revolution. But Mirabeau, who was President of the National Assembly, was a great admirer of Benjamin Franklin. He did not take the Quakers\u27 petition seriously, and historians afterwards forgot about this message. Benjamin Franklin indirectly originated from Nantucket through his mother Abiah Folger. He was a relative of many Nantucket Quakers who went to Dunkerque. So, the two messages brought to France during the French revolution came from Nantucket, directly or indirectly. They are complementary to each other, but the second one still remains to be discovered

Eelgrass Habitat Creation in Nantucket Harbor, Massachusetts

In response to eelgrass habitat losses associated with development and marine activities in and around Nantucket Harbor, a plan to restore a meadow by transplanting eelgrass to previously vegetated areas was developed in conjunction with the Nantucket Land Council. Over 6,000 eelgrass shoots were sustainably harvested from an extensive bed within the Harbor that was located just west of First Point and near the inlet to Nantucket Sound. Four weeks following collection, impacts from our collection were shown by a 24% decline in shoot density, but live eelgrass cover did not decline significantly. After 12 weeks, no effects of collecting could be measured at the donor site for shoot density or cover. Plants had difficulty establishing within the restoration area due in part to extensive phytoplankton and macroalgal blooms that dramatically shaded the transplants for the initial three months following transplanting. After the first growing season, few of the 6,000 plants had survived, but those plants that survived became well established and grew through the second growing season in 2011. The significance of the macroalgae was documented through estimates of percentage cover, whereas light measurements showed the decline in water clarity from phytoplankton blooms to less than 10% ambient. Combined with our planting and monitoring results, our observations suggest that reestablishment of eelgrass beds in Nantucket Harbor is not limited by the distribution of seedlings, but by shading from phytoplankton and macroalgal blooms that resulted in levels of light too low to support eelgrass establishment during the summer months in 2010

Spectral atmospheric observations at Nantucket Island, May 7-14, 1981

An experiment was conducted by the National Langley Research Center to measure atmospheric optical conditions using a 10-channel solar spectral photometer system. This experiment was part of a larger series of multidisciplinary experiments performed in the area of Nantucket Shoals aimed at studying the dynamics of phytoplankton production processes. Analysis of the collected atmospheric data yield total and aerosol optical depths, transmittances, normalized sky radiance distributions, and total and sky irradiances. Results of this analysis may aid in atmospheric corrections of remote sensor data obtained by several sensors overflying the Nantucket Shoals area. Recommendations are presented concerning future experiments using the described solar photometer system and calibration and operational deficiencies uncovered during the experiment

The Living Labs: Nantucket Island

The Living Labs are a practical response to growing environmental challenges, including habitat degradation, loss of biodiversity, and global climate change. Nantucket Living Labs develops and implements holistic solutions to environmental challenges right here and now. The School for the Environment (SFE) established this concept in Conjunction with the Nantucket Field Station, Nantucket Conservation Foundation and ReMain Nantucket, a nonprofit dedicated to supporting a year-round community in the town center

EEOS 406: GIT Data Collection and Field Methods

As part of EEOS 406 course work, students located and mapped distributions of an invasive plant, Spotted knapweed, on Nantucket for the Nantucket Conservation Foundation. Once established, the plant continues to spread to surrounding habitat and outcompetes native species. Prior to their field work, Dr. Sarah Oktay (NFS) and Kelly Omand (NCF) briefed the students on the history of the species on Nantucket. Kelly assigned the location for data collection to further support ongoing NCF research of the species

Creating Community: Examining Black Identity and Space in New Guinea, Nantucket

In the late 18th century, the abolition of slavery through manumission initiated a period of enormous change in the lives of people of African descent living on Nantucket, MA. Newly free, people of color living on the island immediately began to establish families and purchase property. At the end of the 1700s, they founded the community of New Guinea, located on the southwestern edge of the town of Nantucket. Though enslavement had been abolished and the whaling industry brought economic opportunity to Nantucket, the people of New Guinea continued to experience evolving forms of racial inequality, discrimination, and violence. To better understand New Guinea as a free Black community, this research examined deed records, census records, and maps from 1750-1850, bringing together spatial, locational, and demographic data utilizing GIS. These data demonstrated how the embrace of a Black identity and the creation of community space on Nantucket were essential to the formation and persistence of New Guinea. Community space and Black identity also became critical tools in facilitating Black resistance, survival, and empowerment on Nantucket

Humpback and Fin Whaling in the Gulf of Maine from 1800 to 1918

The history of whaling in the Gulf of Maine was reviewed primarily to estimate removals of humpback whales, Megaptera novaeangliae, especially during the 19th century. In the decades from 1800 to 1860, whaling effort consisted of a few localized, small-scale, shore-based enterprises on the coast of Maine and Cape Cod, Mass. Provincetown and Nantucket schooners occasionally conducted short cruises for humpback whales in New England waters. With the development of bomb-lance technology at mid century, the ease of killing humpback whales and fin whales, Balaenoptera physalus, increased. As a result, by the 1870’s there was considerable local interest in hunting rorquals (baleen whales in the family Balaenopteridae, which include the humpback and fin whales) in the Gulf of Maine. A few schooners were specially outfitted to take rorquals in the late 1870’s and 1880’s although their combined annual take was probably no more than a few tens of whales. Also in about 1880, fishing steamers began to be used to hunt whales in the Gulf of Maine. This steamer fishery grew to include about five vessels regularly engaged in whaling by the mid 1880’s but dwindled to only one vessel by the end of the decade. Fin whales constituted at least half of the catch, which exceeded 100 animals in some years. In the late 1880’s and thereafter, few whales were taken by whaling vessels in the Gulf of Maine

Local and remote forcing of interannual sea‐level variability at Nantucket Island

© The Author(s), 2022. This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License. The definitive version was published in Wang, O., Lee, T., Piecuch, C., Fukumori, I., Fenty, I., Frederikse, T., Menemenlis, D., Ponte, R., & Zhang, H. Local and remote forcing of interannual sea‐level variability at Nantucket Island. Journal of Geophysical Research: Oceans, 127(6), (2022): e2021JC018275, https://doi.org/10.1029/2021jc018275.The relative contributions of local and remote wind stress and air-sea buoyancy forcing to sea-level variations along the East Coast of the United States are not well quantified, hindering the understanding of sea-level predictability there. Here, we use an adjoint sensitivity analysis together with an Estimating the Circulation and Climate of the Ocean (ECCO) ocean state estimate to establish the causality of interannual variations in Nantucket dynamic sea level. Wind forcing explains 67% of the Nantucket interannual sea-level variance, while wind and buoyancy forcing together explain 97% of the variance. Wind stress contribution is near-local, primarily from the New England shelf northeast of Nantucket. We disprove a previous hypothesis about Labrador Sea wind stress being an important driver of Nantucket sea-level variations. Buoyancy forcing, as important as wind stress in some years, includes local contributions as well as remote contributions from the subpolar North Atlantic that influence Nantucket sea level a few years later. Our rigorous adjoint-based analysis corroborates previous correlation-based studies indicating that sea-level variations in the subpolar gyre and along the United States northeast coast can both be influenced by subpolar buoyancy forcing. Forward perturbation experiments further indicate remote buoyancy forcing affects Nantucket sea level mostly through slow advective processes, although coastally trapped waves can cause rapid Nantucket sea level response within a few weeks.This research was carried out in part at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, California Institute of Technology, under a contract with the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (80NM0018D0004). CGP was supported by NASA Sea Level Change Team awards 80NSSC20K1241 and 80NM0018D0004