NOAA’s Gulf of the Farallones National Marine Sanctuary advises beachgoers against interacting with any seal pups they may find on the beach. Newborn harbor seal pups, born in late winter and spring, could suffer permanent harm if someone not licensed in marine mammal rescue were to move them.

NOAA has named Robert Maxson director of the Aviation Weather Center in Kansas City, the nation’s primary source of weather information for domestic and international flights. Maxson will leave his post as a research pilot with the National Science Foundation in Boulder, Colo. and begin his new duties at NOAA on Feb. 4.

More than 600 volunteers gathered data from the shores of Oahu, Kauai, the Big Island, and Kahoolawe for Saturday’s annual Hawaiian Islands Humpback Whale National Marine Sanctuary Ocean Count on Jan. 26.

NOAA’s Channel Islands National Marine Sanctuary has extended the deadline to Feb. 10 for applications for the tourism alternate and Chumash Community member and alternate positions on its advisory council.

David Westerholm, former chief of the U.S. Coast Guard’s Office of Response, has been named the new director of NOAA's Office of Response and Restoration.

NOAA’s top official today expressed concern that a contractor’s slow development of a critical new sensor will delay its delivery for a scheduled launch of a precursor mission for the National Polar-Orbiting Environmental Satellite System (NPOESS).

A warming global ocean — influencing the winds that shear off the tops of developing storms — could mean fewer Atlantic hurricanes striking the United States according to new findings by NOAA climate scientists.

NOAA has awarded a regional consortium of Great Lakes area universities and research organizations $760,000 for the first year of a five-year, $3.8 million pilot project to develop a new approach to analyzing and managing the cumulative effects of climate change, land use, invasive species, and other environmental stressors on Saginaw Bay and its surrounding ecosystem.

A former Gray’s Reef National Marine Sanctuary research ship sunk last year off the Georgia coast as an artificial reef is now home to a diverse array of marine fish and invertebrates after only four months on the bottom, according to NOAA scientists.

NOAA’s Fisheries Service is asking for public comment as it considers four alternatives to deter California sea lions from eating imperiled salmon and steelhead that congregate below the Bonneville Dam on the lower Columbia River as they head upriver to spawn.

An international research team, including biologists from NOAA’s Fisheries Service, reported in the scientific journal Conservation Biology, that the estimated population of vaquita, a porpoise found in the Gulf of California, is likely two years away from reaching such low levels that their rate to extinction will increase and possibly be irreversible.

New coral reef maps released by NOAA reveal that the Big Island of Hawaii has the highest percentage of live coral of the main Hawaiian islands.