National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration in the context of "US Navy hull classification symbol"

The Potomac River (/pəˈtoʊmək/ ) is in the Mid-Atlantic region of the United States and flows from the Potomac Highlands in West Virginia to Chesapeake Bay in Maryland. It is 405 miles (652 km) long, with a drainage area of 14,700 square miles (38,000 km), and is the fourth-largest river along the East Coast of the United States. More than 6 million people live within its watershed.

The river forms part of the borders between Maryland and Washington, D.C., on the left descending bank, and West Virginia and Virginia on the right descending bank. Except for a small portion of its headwaters in West Virginia, the North Branch Potomac River is considered part of Maryland to the low-water mark on the opposite bank. The South Branch Potomac River lies completely within the state of West Virginia except for its headwaters, which lie in Virginia. All navigable parts of the river were designated as a National Recreation Trail in 2006, and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) designated an 18-square-mile (47 km) portion of the river in Charles County, Maryland, as the Mallows Bay–Potomac River National Marine Sanctuary in 2019.

The Arctic ice pack is the sea ice cover of the Arctic Ocean and its vicinity. The Arctic ice pack undergoes a regular seasonal cycle in which ice melts in spring and summer, reaches a minimum around mid-September, then increases during autumn and winter. Summer ice cover in the Arctic is about 50% of winter cover. Some of the ice survives from one year to the next. Currently, 28% of Arctic basin sea ice is multi-year ice, thicker than seasonal ice: up to 3–4 m (9.8–13.1 ft) thick over large areas, with ridges up to 20 m (65.6 ft) thick. Besides the regular seasonal cycle there has been an underlying trend of declining sea ice in the Arctic in recent decades as well.

The National Snow and Ice Data Center (NSIDC) is a United States information and referral center in support of polar and cryospheric research. NSIDC archives and distributes digital and analog snow and ice data and also maintains information about snow cover, avalanches, glaciers, ice sheets, freshwater ice, sea ice, ground ice, permafrost, atmospheric ice, paleoglaciology, and ice cores.

NSIDC is part of the University of Colorado Boulder Cooperative Institute for Research in Environmental Sciences (CIRES), and is affiliated with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) National Centers for Environmental Information through a cooperative agreement. NSIDC serves as one of twelve Distributed Active Archive Centers funded by the National Aeronautics and Space Administration to archive and distribute data from NASA's past and current satellites and field measurement programs. NSIDC also supports the National Science Foundation through the Exchange For Local Observations and Knowledge of the Arctic (ELOKA) and other scientific research grants. NSIDC is also a member of the ICSU World Data System. sujit Serreze is the director of NSIDC.

Deep Space Climate Observatory (DSCOVR; formerly known as Triana, unofficially known as GoreSat) is a National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) space weather, space climate, and Earth observation satellite. It was launched by SpaceX on a Falcon 9 v1.1 launch vehicle on 11 February 2015, from Cape Canaveral. This is NOAA's first operational deep space satellite and became its primary system of warning Earth in the event of solar magnetic storms.

DSCOVR was originally proposed as an Earth observation spacecraft positioned at the Sun-Earth L₁ Lagrange point, providing live video of the sunlit side of the planet through the Internet as well as scientific instruments to study climate change. Political changes in the United States resulted in the mission's cancellation, and in 2001 the spacecraft was placed into storage.

Princeton University is a private Ivy League research university in Princeton, New Jersey, United States. Founded in 1746 in Elizabeth as the College of New Jersey, Princeton is the fourth-oldest institution of higher education in the United States and one of the nine colonial colleges chartered before the American Revolution. The institution moved to Newark in 1747 and then to its Mercer County campus in Princeton nine years later. It officially became a university in 1896 and was subsequently renamed Princeton University.

The university is governed by the Trustees of Princeton University and has an endowment of $37.7 billion, the largest endowment per student in the United States. Princeton provides undergraduate and graduate instruction in the humanities, social sciences, natural sciences, and engineering to approximately 8,500 students on its main campus spanning 600 acres (2.4 km) within the borough of Princeton. It offers postgraduate degrees through the Princeton School of Public and International Affairs, the School of Engineering and Applied Science, the School of Architecture and the Bendheim Center for Finance. The university also manages the Department of Energy's Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory and is home to the NOAA's Geophysical Fluid Dynamics Laboratory. It is classified among "R1: Doctoral Universities – Very high research activity" and has one of the largest university libraries in the world.

The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration Commissioned Officer Corps (informally the NOAA Corps) is one of eight federal uniformed services of the United States, and operates under the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), a scientific agency overseen by the Department of Commerce. The NOAA Corps is made up of scientifically and technically trained officers. The NOAA Corps and the United States Public Health Service Commissioned Corps are the only U.S. uniformed services that consist only of commissioned officers, with no enlisted or warrant officer ranks. The NOAA Corps' primary mission is to monitor oceanic conditions, support major waterways, and monitor atmospheric conditions.

The NOAA Corps traces its origins to the establishment of the United States Coast and Geodetic Survey Corps on May 22, 1917, which the service recognizes as its official date of establishment. The Coast and Geodetic Survey Corps became the Environmental Science Services Administration Corps in 1965, which in turn became the NOAA Corps in 1970.

In the United States Navy, United States Coast Guard, United States Public Health Service Commissioned Corps (USPHS Corps), and National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration Commissioned Officer Corps (NOAA Corps), captain is the senior-most commissioned officer rank below that of flag officer (i.e., admirals). The equivalent rank is colonel in the United States Army, Air Force, Space Force, and Marine Corps.

Reflecting its nautical heritage, the term captain is used as a military title by officers of more junior rank who command a commissioned vessel of the Navy, Coast Guard, or National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) of patrol boat size or greater. Officers below O-6 who command aviation squadrons (typically O-5 commanders) usually use the less formal title "skipper".

Submarine volcanoes are underwater vents or fissures in the Earth's surface from which magma can erupt. Many submarine volcanoes are located near areas of tectonic plate formation, known as mid-ocean ridges. The volcanoes at mid-ocean ridges alone are estimated to account for 75% of the magma output on Earth. Although most submarine volcanoes are located in the depths of seas and oceans, some also exist in shallow water, and these can discharge material into the atmosphere during an eruption. The total number of submarine volcanoes is estimated to be over one million (most are now extinct) of which some 75,000 rise more than 1 kilometre (0.62 miles) above the seabed. Only 119 submarine volcanoes in Earth's oceans and seas are known to have erupted during the last 11,700 years.

Hydrothermal vents, sites of abundant biological activity, are commonly found near submarine volcanoes.

Depth sounding, often simply called sounding, is measuring the depth of a body of water. Data taken from soundings are used in bathymetry to make maps of the floor of a body of water, such as the seabed topography.

Soundings were traditionally shown on nautical charts in fathoms and feet. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), the agency responsible for bathymetric data in the United States, still uses fathoms and feet on nautical charts. In other countries, the International System of Units (metres) has become the standard for measuring depth.