The US space agency is all set to launch a new online tool for the protection of endangered blue whales.

The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) will release the WhaleWatch tool later this year. The tool will be helpful in decreasing whale mortality due to collisions with shipping and fishing gear.

Presently, about a fourth of the nearly 12,000 blue whales in the world are living in the Pacific Ocean. They are the biggest animal that has ever lived on Earth. It is over 100 feet long, over 100 tonnes in weight and is colored a sort of iridescent blue.

In a statement, Bruce Mate, director of the Marine Mammal Institute at Oregon State University, said, “When you see them rising to the surface, you start seeing this glimmer that keeps getting bigger and bigger. They are just amazing”.

Mate has been tagging blue whales since 1979, and was part of a team that has created the new WhaleWatch tool.

The tool will be used in addressing conflicts between humans and whales based on his tag data of four whale species and satellite observations from NASA and other agencies.

Every month, it will show the most likely locations of blue, humpback, fin, and grey whales along the West Coast of the US and Canada on the basis of current environmental conditions detected by satellites.

Besides this, WhaleWatch has a daily product that will predict the movements of blue whales for any given day. For developing the tool, the team began with 15 years of whale tag data and matched it in place and time with ocean depth measurements and satellite measurements of sea surface temperate, chlorophyll concentration and sea surface height.

A lot of blue whales, along with other endangered whale species migrate up and down the California coast, which has heavy fishing and shipping traffic to and from the major ports of Los Angeles and San Francisco.