US ocean observatories imperiled by 'earmark' crackdown
The Senate has twice passed bills to formally establish and fund a national monitoring system, but House versions never came to a vote.
from the May 2, 2007 edition
Page 2 of 3
The establishment of such a national system was one of the key 2004 recommendations of the US Commission on Ocean Policy, a body appointed by President Bush. The official report urged Congress to commit $650 million annually to build and maintain the system, which it said would have "invaluable economic, societal, and environmental benefits."
One of those benefits has been improved search and rescue.
"We're often trying to predict where survivors will have drifted over the time it takes for us to get to them, so we rely on predictive models of wind and currents," says Art Allen of the Coast Guard's search and rescue headquarters in Washington, D.C. "These systems allow our controllers to get the best available data at a push of a button, increasing the precision of our analysis and getting us there faster."
Fishermen use data on deep-water temperatures and the abundance of microscopic floating plants to figure out where fish might be, while many of Maine's recreational boaters have grown accustomed to getting detailed information on offshore wind and seas. Scientists are also keenly interested in the data to figure out how to harvest marine life without destroying the ocean's ability to produce it.
"These buoys are unique in that they collect temperature and current information not just at the surface, but at various intervals of depth," says Dr. Wahle, who studies the lobsters that support Maine's signature fishery. "With bottom-dwelling creatures like lobsters, it's far more important to know what's going on deep beneath the ocean."
Funding problems
Now, GoMoos may be forced to shut down. "We may be pulling out some of our buoys, or we may be pulling all of them," says Tom Shyka, GoMoos' chief operating officer. "We're working on other funding opportunities to avoid that, but we're definitely in a period of uncertainty."
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