June is always a busy month at NOAA, and IOOS is no exception. June is National Ocean Month and the first full month of hurricane season. And today, June 8, is World Ocean Day, celebrated worldwide since 2008 to raise awareness of this vital resource and remind us all how deeply we’re connected to and affected by it.
At IOOS, our mission is to gather and integrate the vital information that helps us understand and study the ocean. Our data helps forecasters measure water temperatures below the surface that could affect hurricane intensity. It helps search and rescue operations narrow their search areas, increasing the odds of successful rescues. It helps anglers and aquaculturists prepare for harmful algal bloom events by detecting blooms early. It helps researchers contextualize and better understand phenomena like marine heat waves. Ocean observations are foundational to our relationship with the ocean and all it provides.
Hurricane season began May 15 in the Pacific basin and on June 1 in the Atlantic basin, so the 2026 season is now fully underway. NOAA has predicted a below-normal season for the Atlantic basin, but an above-normal season for the eastern and central Pacific basin. If you are interested in the observations and models that help guide and inform those predictions, we’ve put together a reference page for our most relevant storm resources. This year, we’ve added a storm archive to our Model Viewer, allowing users to easily revisit significant storms since 2008, as well as all storms since 2020. As always, keep up with the National Hurricane Center for up-to-the-minute storm information throughout the season.
Finally, we want to take a moment to express our support and sympathy for longtime SECOORA/IOOS partners at The Marine Science Laboratory at the University of South Florida, along with their colleagues and students, who were affected by a devastating fire in early May. We also want to share our gratitude and appreciation to those same researchers and students, who were able to access their systems on-site and restore access to both buoy and high-frequency radar data for the West Florida Shelf within days — all with no loss of data. Our thoughts are with them as they continue to navigate the assessment and recovery process, and to all of those in the wider ocean science community whose lives and careers are connected to the lab. We also want to thank our friends and partners who have come to the aid of USF impacted programs, providing back up supplies to help mitigate the losses.