600 B.C. – Phoenicians explore the ocean with sailing ships. They have little understanding of the unpredictable and overwhelming environment of the ocean. They “hug the coast” and go no further than the coastline and near-shore environments.
500–700 – Polynesians develop an elaborate system for navigating between the many islands of the South Pacific, a area of approximately 10 million square miles. They use indicators such s the stars, sun, planets, moon, winds clouds, currents, and tides as “landmarks.”
900 – Vikings explore the Arctic and Northern Atlantic Ocean around Greenland, Iceland, and Newfoundland. They use the North Star as a reference point to guide them.
1000 – The Chinese invent the compass, contributing substantially to ocean navigation. Early compasses are nothing more than a floating magnetized needle in a bowl of water.
1492 – Christopher Columbus left Spain following the prevailing winds and surface ocean currents southwest toward the Canary Islands all the way to the Caribbean islands where he first sighted land.
1513 Ponce de Leon - Earliest surviving reference to Gulf Stream was made when he sailed from Puerto Rico.
1515 - Peter Martyr of Angheira argued that the Gulf Stream must result from the deflection of the North Equatorial Current by the American mainland.
1519 – Ferdinand Magellan begins the first sailing voyage around the world. The voyage is completed in 1521.
1539 – Olaus Magnus, published a detailed map of the Nordic countries called the Carta Marina. The map includes a band of whorls that correspond almost perfectly with the Iceland-Faroes Front, a major surface front.
1665 – Experiences gained from whaling expeditions and Europeans colonizing the eastern coast of North America add to the knowledge of currents which is handed down by word of mouth. The first navigation chart is published showing the Gulf Stream.
1764 - William Gerard De Brahm, his majesty’s Surveyor-General of the new colony of Florida, made the first authoritative chart of the Gulf Stream.
1768 – James Cook begins the first of three voyages in which he maps the Pacific Ocean. He uses a chronometer to obtain the first accurate determinations of longitude. This is one of the first ocean investigations conducted for scientific purposes.
1772 - Benjamin Franklin and Timothy Folger plot the course of the Gulf Stream. Uses thermometer as an aid to navigation. Franklin engraves and prints a chart of the Gulf Stream for the General Post Office, on the instructions of the Postmaster-General of the Colonies, Benjamin Franklin.
1802 - Captain Strickland measures surface-water temperatures in the North -Easterly extension of the Gulf Stream toward Britain and Scandinavia.
1832 - James Rennell, the father of geography, studied data from the British Admiralty Office and distinguished between 'drift currents' and 'stream currents'
His intensive study of the Gulf Stream is published posthumously.
1844 - Alexander Dallas Bache of the United States Coast and Geodetic Survey creates modern hydrographic survey of the Gulf Stream.
1853 - American naval officer and hydrographer, Matthew Fontaine Maury initiated a conference of delegates from maritime nations in Brussels to devise a standard code of observational practice
1855 – U.S. Navy Lieutenant Mathew Maury collects ships’ logs from around the world. He uses the data to produce and publish the first atlas of sailing directions and sea conditions. “The Physical Geography of the Sea," is credited often as one of the first books on oceanography.
1872-1875 - The Challenger Expedition, the first fully scientific oceanography expedition, is launched. Data on salinity, temperature, and density of water, ocean currents, sediments and meterology is collected. This gives birth to the new science of oceanography, encompassing physical, chemical, geological and biological studies.
1885 - Henrik Mohn, developed a formula for computing ocean current speeds from the isobraic surfaces or the gradient equation.
1890's - John Elliot Pillsbury was convinced that ocean currents were generated by the wind. He measured the Gulf Stream temperature at a number of depths and also recorded the direction and speed of the current. These observations were not repeated until relatively recently and have been invaluable to oceanographers in the twentieth century. Additionally, Fridtjof Nansen, a Norwegian scientist led an expedition across the Arctic ice. His vessel, the Fram, was allowed to freeze into the ice and drift with it for over a year. Nansen observed that ice movements in response to wind were not parallel to the wind, but at an angle of 20-40 degrees to the right of it. “Ocean Circulation, The Open University”
1903 - The Scripps Institute for Biological Research is founded. It is the first major institution in the United States to concentrate on marine studies, and the first of many such institutes that will foster a growth spurt of new knowledge in the twentieth century.
1905 – Ekman’s initial work on wind-driven currents, intended to explain current flow at an angle to the wind directions is published. Ekman assumes a hypothetical ocean, which was not only infinitely wide and deep, but also had not horizontal pressure gradients.
1910 - Sandstrom and Hellan-hansen investigate the possibility of using the density distribution in the oceans to deduce current velocities.
1947 – Harald Sverdrup, Scandinavian oceanographer used mathematics to determine current flow in response to wind stress and horizontal pressure gradients. Additionally, Thor Heyerdalh and five companions crossed 7,700 kilometers of the equatorial Pacific on Kon-Tiki. Heyerdalh proposed that such rafts allowed the natives to sail from South America to the Polynesian Islands. To test this hypothesis, the Kon-Tiki was launched from Callao, Peru on April 28, 1947 and on August 6 landed at Raroia atoll, part of the Tuamotu atolls. Henry Stommel also publishes a paper in which he developed an analytical model showing how the westward intensification of ocean currents is caused by the variation of the Coriolis parameter with latitude.
1950 – Large-scale government funding for ocean science increases greatly after World War 2.
1950 – 1960 - freely drifting floats provide direct evidence of the Gulf Stream counter-currents.
1955 – John Swallow deploys the “Swallow Float” from the RRS, ‘Discovery 11’. The float is made from etched aluminum and acoustically tracked from a ship.
1955 - Crombie discovers experimentally that Bragg scatter produces strong High Frequency (HF) sea echo to first order.
1957 – Russia developed Sputnik, the first man-made satellite, which to a technological race between Russia and America. As a result, funding for American science increases greatly. Among others, the Office of Naval Research (ONR) and the National Science Foundation (NSF) contribute significantly to oceanographic research.
1965 - Stommel developed a theory of the global thermohaline circulation that supported the idea of deep equator ward deep currents. Stommel demonstrated that the intensification of the western boundary currents of subtropical gyres is a consequence of the increase in the Coriolis parameter with latitude and that western intensification can be explained in terms of vorticity balance. “Ocean Circulation, Open University”,
1970 – Soviets carried out Polygon-70 in the Atlantic North Equatorial Current to investigate intermediate-scale variability in the ocean.
1971 – 1973 - The Mid-Ocean Dynamics Experiment (MODE) studied small scale variability within the western Atlantic ocean, south of Bermuda by combining results obtained from fixed current meters, freely drifting floats, and dynamic topography calculated from temperature and salinity data.
1973-1983 - Barrick leads team at NOAA to develop more practical alternatives to large High Frequency (HF) phased arrays for coastal current and wave monitoring. Patents were filed and over 100 papers published on CODAR concepts within government.
1978 – Sun-synchronous, Nimus-7 satellite launched with the Coastal Zone Color Scanner (CZCS) instrument by NOAA and NASA. CZCS data shows distributions of sea-surface temperature and phytoplankton pigments. It provided global coverage every 6 days.
1978 - SeaSat, was an experimental satellite flight-tested four instruments that used radar to study Earth and its seas. Many later Earth-orbiting instruments developed at JPL owe their legacy to this mission.
1980’s – Observational oceanography was revolutionized by the introduction of Acoustic Doppler Current Profiler (ADCP). This instrument uses sound to measure current velocity.
1982 – Climatologic Atlas of the World Ocean is published by NOAA, which contains the observed mean hydrographic state for the ocean. The Atlas is often known as the Levitus climatology.
1983-1988 - CODAR technology adapted and tested on North Sea offshore oilrigs.
1990 - Ocean modeling becomes a regular practice in oceanography with the introduction of the Fasham Model, a widely distributed model of an upper ocean ecosystem.
1991-1994 – Autonomous Underwater Vehicles are developed and become operational.
1992 – Under a joint plan between NASA and France's National Center for Space Studies, this satellite mission measures sea level every 10 days. This mission allows scientists to chart the height of the seas across ocean basins with an accuracy of less than 10 centimeters (4 inches). This data provided a unique view of El Niño and La Niña.
1996 - NSCAT, a microwave radar scatterometer, measured near-surface wind vectors (both speed and direction) over the global oceans. This information is critical in determining regional weather patterns and global climate. NSCAT had two major systems - the space borne instrument system and the ground data processing system.
NSCAT was launched, August 16, 1996, aboard the Advanced Earth Observing Satellite (ADEOS), a mission of the National Space Development Agency of Japan. ADEOS was launched into a near-polar Sun-synchronous orbit, by an H-II launch vehicle from Japan's Tanegashima Space Center.
1996 - NASA measures the winds over the oceans with the Scatterometer (NSCAT) mission launched aboard Japan's ADEOS-Midori Satellite in August, 1996. Its mission was to collect information on coverage, resolution, and accuracy in the determination of ocean wind speed and direction.
1997 – Tropical Rainfall Measuring Mission (TRMM) satellite is launched on December 8. TRMM is a research satellite designed to help our understanding of the water cycle in the current climate system. By covering the tropical and semi-tropical regions of the Earth, TRMM will provide much needed data on rainfall and the heat release associated with rainfall.
1997 - The SeaStar spacecraft, carries the SeaWiFS instrument and was launched to low Earth orbit on board an extended Pegasus launch vehicle on August 1, 1997. Data from SeaWiFS has been used to create images of the Global Biosphere – the ocean’s long-term average phytoplankton chlorophyll concentration.
1999 - The SeaWinds instrument aboard the QuikScat satellite enables researchers to look through cloud cover and measure winds at the ocean's surface. SeaWinds can spot tropical depressions that can lead to hurricanes before they are visible in conventional satellite imagery.
1999 – DYNAMO (Dynamics of North Atlantic Models) compared three different models of the North Atlantic.
1999 – Terra is NASA’s “Earth Observing System flagship satellite, is launched on December 18, 1999. Terra is a mulit-national, multi-disciplinary mission carrying five remote sensors, which together, are measuring the state of Earth’s environment and climate system.
2000 - The National Oceanographic Partnership Program (NOPP) creates Ocean.US, which is dedicated to developing an integrated ocean observing system (IOOS) within the next decade. IOOS will improve weather forecasting via ocean data and restore and preserve marine ecosystems.
2001 – Jason 1, like its predecessor, Topex/Poseidon, is a joint U.S./French oceanography mission. The Jason-1 satellite monitors global ocean circulation, study ties between the oceans and atmosphere, improve global climate predictions and monitor events like El Niño.
2002 - The SeaWinds scatterometer is a specialized microwave radar that measures near-surface wind velocity (both speed and direction) under all weather and cloud conditions over Earth's oceans. The experiment is a follow-on mission and continues the data series initiated in 1996 by the NSCAT. SeaWinds sends radar pulses to the ocean surface and measures the signals that bounce back to the satellite. SeaWinds can acquire hundreds of times more observations of surface wind speed and directions each day than ships or buoys.
2002 - GRACE, the joint U.S.-German mission consists of two spacecraft flying in tandem to measure Earth's gravitational field very precisely. This will enable a better understanding of ocean surface currents and ocean heat transport.
2005 – Ocean Surface Topography, this mission will be a follow-on to the Jason-1 mission.
2008 - Sea Surface Salinity (SSS) is a key measurement in the global water cycle but it is not yet monitored from space. Starting in 2008, Aquarius mission will measure global SSS with unprecedented resolution. The science instruments will include a set of three radiometers that are sensitive to salinity (1.413 GHz; L-band) and a scatterometer that corrects for the ocean's surface roughhness. The spacecraft will be contributed by Argentina's Comisión Nacional de Actividades Espaciales (CONAE).
2008 – Ocean vector winds mission, this mission will be a follow-on to the Sea Winds and Adeos11 mission.
