View non-flash version
currents and air sea interaction around the Philippines. There are large ?internal waves,? underwater currents and mezoscale eddies being formed in the Luzon Strait. Other research in the Indian Ocean, conducted in collaboration with India and Sri Lanka, has also yielded astonishing results. We?re tak- ing ships into the Bay of Bengal and nding out that there is an astonishing amount of fresh water being dumped into the Indian Ocean during monsoons. And as we study typhoons, we?re nding that there are three times as many typhoons as hurricanes in the Atlantic, and they?re bigger. We can study the effect of typhoons I and their ?storm wake? to see how the storms bring up colder water that extracts heat from the upper ocean. It takes time for the ocean to relax back to the previous current conditions,? said Herr. ONR owns Alvin, and its support ship Atlantis. Both are operated by WHOI. There is the potential to discover a new life form every time Alvin dives. ?If it?s investigating hot smokers along the ocean ridges it might discover new microbial life forms. There?s always something new to nd in deepest part of the oceans,? Schnoor said.?Ships are still an indispensable element of tool kit,? said Herr. ?I expect that will persist for the foreseeable future. We need to be on the ocean, to put our instruments where the problems and questions are.? Scripps operates the ONR-owned Floating Instrument Plat- form, or FLIP, which can be towed to a location and anchored or allowed drift. ?It?s fairly large, but still a smaller foot- print than a ship when vertical,? said Herr. ?It?s a very stable, noise-free platform for instruments.? NOAA: A Balanced Approach Rear Adm. Mike Devany is the director of National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA?s) Commissioned Of cer Corps and the NOAA Of ce of Marine and Avia- tion Operations. In his position he co-chairs an interagency working group on facilities and infrastructure. ?The National Ocean Policy directed us to get a baseline of where we?ve been, where we are, and where we need to go with the Federal Oceanographic Fleet. We all face budget issues, so we have to be realistic, but we set out to show what it costs to operate and maintain the vessels. We looked at what it costs to operate, maintain and sustain the eet?both for the government oper- ated survey ships and the university operated research ships. Fuel is the big cost driver. Fuel was $0.84 a gallon when I was in command in 2004, and today it?s almost $4.00 a gal- lon?so, a pretty dramatic increase.? Devany said the other big cost driver is the hiring, train- ing and retaining of quali ed crew. ?Here at NOAA, we are able to do that and compete successfully, because we have a blended work force of wage mariners?which are the same as CivMar for the Military Sealift Command; civilian techni- cians such as electronics technicians and survey specialists; and then the NOAA corps which generally does the overall operation and the running of the platforms in the command for them.? ?Once we started putting together the report, we noticed that things were changing rapidly because this was the year of se- questration, and last year was the real point where declining budgets started to show up,? Devany said. ?We could see that it was important to optimize the eet. In our case, we?ve tak- en several ships either of ine?either decommissioned them or placed them in a warm layup status?until we could make a decision on what we wanted to do with them down the road.? NSF and the Navy have done the same with the university operated ships, he said. ?We all have a goal of creating a eet that we can operate under today?s budget and the con- straints that go with that. When we looked out 10 years into the future, we could see that we need a balanced approach that leverages resources, partnerships and new technologies. We also need to ensure the eet is properly capitalized to meet the nation?s scienti c requirements.? Devany said the report is divided between survey and re- search ships. ?The UNOLS community operates generally for academic research. In order to keep them at a higher uti- lization rate, they take on some of the survey responsibilities for other agencies, including NOAA. The ships that I operate for NOAA and the different communities that we support are gathering data for environmental, mapping, weather, oceano- graphic or sheries. And we wanted to make sure that we could match the requirements to the eet. This is a nation- wide enterprise. And if you want to leverage your cost, you need some commonality, the ability to share assets or resourc- es and a way to get to a platform that?s going to be less ex- pensive to use because it might already be working in the area we?re interested in. Transiting eats up fuel and people time.? The Navy also operates survey ships. ?There are some ex- ceptions, but generally NOAA is responsible for the survey work in domestic waters, and the DoD ships operated by the Navy work in international waters,? Devany said. According to Devany, the NOAA ships are specialized plat- forms. ?We categorize them into natural resources versus commerce, which would be the hydrographic ships, equipped and crewed to conduct nautical charting or surveys. We also have FSVs ( shery survey vessels) that are con gured to be acoustically quiet. They assess sh stocks, monitor marine mammals and do some bathymetric mapping, which is dif-ferent from charting in terms of being able to go out and sur- vey the bottom and know what?s down there so they could do some habitat mapping for sheries for resources. ? Hydrographic ships have an advanced multi-beam system for ship-mounted charting, as well as two-four launches for working at the bays and inlets. A ship like the Thomas Jeffer- son, for instance, assisted with post-Sandy recovery in New York Harbor. The ship deployed its launches, to see where all the wreckage was and determine what needed to be cleared, Ocean Observation September 201358 MTRMTR #7 (50-65).indd 58MTR #7 (50-65).indd 588/22/2013 11:46:56 AM8/22/2013 11:46:56 AM
