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www.sea-technology.com March 2016 / st 57 CHANNEL INDUSTRIES SENSORS ACOUSTIC SYSTEMS CTG HQ 879 Ward Drive Santa Barbara, CA 93111 USA Phone: 001.805.683.1431 ctgsales@channeltech.com MATERIALS SYSTEMS INC. 543 Great Road Littleton, MA 01460 USA Phone: 001.978.486.0404 info@matsysinc.com HC MATERIALS 479 Quadrangle Drive, Suite E Bolingbrook, IL 60440 USA Phone: 001.630.226.9080 info@channeltech.com Making the Invisible Visible Power of Vertical Integration - Let It Work for You Piezo Electric Ceramics Single Crystals Hydrophones Transducers Ultrasound Arrays Range Systems Sonar Systems Navigation Systems Custom Acoustic Solutions Piezo Electric Composites ADVANCED MATERIALS SYSTEMS SENSORS MATERIALS low acoustic transmitters tagged on whale sharks. The Wave Gliders can follow transmissions for up to two years. With large data sets being pro- cessed on board, and real-time com- munication to the WSORC offce, this enables the creation of records for whale shark's precise behavior in the Caribbean, from migration routes to feeding behavior and seasonal move- ments. Sharks at Risk of Being Overfshed in Hotspots A new study from an international team of scientists found commercial fshing vessels target shark hotspots in the North Atlantic. The researchers suggest that sharks are at risk of being overfshed in these oceanic hotspots. The authors report in the study that catch quotas for sharks by commer- cial fshers might be necessary to pro- tect oceanic sharks. From 2005 to 2009, the research- ers tracked more than 100 sharks equipped with satellite tags from six different species in the North Atlantic while concurrently tracking 186 Span- ish and Portuguese GPS-equipped longline fshing vessels. They found that the fshing vessels and sharks occurred in ocean fronts character- ized by warm water temperature and high productivity, including the Gulf Stream and the North Atlantic Cur- rent/Labrador Current Convergence Zone near Newfoundland. About 80 percent of the range for two of the most heavily fshed species tracked—the blue and mako sharks— overlapped with the fshing vessels' range, with some individual sharks remaining near longlines for over 60 percent of the time they were tracked. Blue sharks were estimated to be vul- nerable to potential capture 20 days per month, while the mako sharks' potential risk was 12 days per month. Warmer Atlantic Could Trigger Stronger Storms A new study by a team of scientists led by the University of Maryland's Earth System Science Interdisciplin- ary Center (ESSIC) suggests that a warmer Atlantic Ocean could sub- stantially boost the destructive power of a future superstorm like Hurricane Sandy. The researchers used a numerical model to simulate the weather pat- terns that created Sandy, with one key difference: a much warmer sea surface temperature, as would be ex- pected in a world with twice as much carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. This simulated warmer ocean gener- ated storms that were 50 to 160 per- cent more destructive than Sandy. In the model scenarios, the pool of warm water (greater than 27° C) in the tropical Atlantic grew to twice its actual size. The larger warm pool gave the simulated hurricanes more time to grow before they encoun- tered colder water or land. Because of their longer exposure to the large warm pool, their winds had 50 to 80 percent more destructive power, and brought 30 to 50 percent more heavy rain. Sandy was most likely a "per- fect storm" so it's hard to conclude whether and how global warming contributed to Sandy and other re- cent destructive storms. But studies like this can help answer how a per- fect storm would behave in warmer ocean temperatures. ST