Statement to the Science Advisory Board National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration Dr. D. Jay Grimes, Chair, Board on Oceans and Atmosphere The National Association of State Universities and Land Grant Colleges April 2000, Washington, D.C. The Board on Oceans and Atmosphere (BOA) of the National Association of State Universities and Land Grant Colleges (NASULGC) appreciates this opportunity to provide its views to the NOAA Science Advisory Board. NASULGC, and its Board on Oceans and Atmosphere, is proud to be one of NOAA's key partners, playing a constructive and supportive role when we can. We look forward to a continuing dialogue with NOAA and the SAB. NASULGC is the nation's oldest higher education association. Currently the association has over 200 member institutions -- including the historically black Land Grant institutions -- located in all fifty states. The Association's overriding mission is to support high quality public education through efforts that enhance the capacity of member institutions to perform their traditional teaching, research, and public service roles. The Board on Oceans and Atmosphere is composed of leading educators and research scholars in the Association's universities. The Board works to ensure that the nation maintains and benefits from a strong and diverse academic capability in the marine (including Great Lakes) and atmospheric sciences. The Board would like to make a few recommendations to the SAB. Revise NOAA's Strategic Plan We recognize that NOAA's effort to develop a Strategic Plan is influenced in part by the mandates in the Government Performance and Results Act. Nevertheless, formal strategic planing is a valuable exercise for the Agency, internally for developing a collective sense of purpose and externally for marshalling constituent understanding and support. NOAA's current Strategic Plan appears to have served the Agency well, and to have contributed some of NOAA's recent budgetary and programmatic successes. However, the plan is now almost 7 years old and it is showing its age. We have been advising NOAA for some time to incorporate a strong, explicit science and technology element in its strategic plan. This element should discuss the purpose and importance of research and development to NOAA, identify major scientific themes, and state how the research and development will be integrated into line office missions. In addition to the establishment of a broad scientific vision for NOAA, strategic planning will lead to a candid assessment of gaps that exist in the current organization that prevent achievement of that vision. Once identified, action can be taken to fill these gaps. The plan should also outline a process for developing new goals and programs. Finally, the strategic plan should discuss in some depth how NOAA would engage the external community to accomplish its scientific goals and future technological needs. Strengthen the NOAA Joint and Cooperative Institutes There are currently eleven cooperative institutes operated jointly by universities and the Office of Oceanic and Atmospheric Research at NOAA. There are similar and equally as important arrangements for cooperative institutes operated jointly by universities and the National Weather Service or the National Ocean Service. These cooperative institutes are geographically dispersed. Most are co-located with OAR laboratories or other NOAA facilities. All serve as formal links between NOAA and university programs, and provide NOAA its greatest opportunities to leverage university resources. These institutes work closely together, sharing expertise and developing common agendas for NOAA related research. They provide NOAA a broad range of services and professional, technical, and administrative support. In addition, scientists, engineers, and technicians within some of these institutes carry out a significant fraction of all NOAA-supported research and development. NASULGC recommends that the SAB regularly and routinely hear from the directors from these institutes. It should be noted that a FACA-approved committee under the SAB now reviews cooperative institutes. Recently some cooperative institutes have been tasked by NOAA to serve in a new role as regional centers. Conceivably, using cooperative institutes for this purpose could reduce the administrative burden on smaller institutions while broadening the NOAA research base in the region. With adequate staffing, the Institutes could provide expert guidance in the development of proposals and would provide regional contacts for researchers and administrators. However, while this new role may have merit, it should not be done simply to pass an administrative burden from NOAA headquarters to the cooperative institutes, nor should it interfere with or detract from the institutes as centers for research and development. If NOAA desires for the institutes to serve as hubs for regional NOAA-funded activities, then the institutes must be provided the additional funding needed to hire appropriate administrative staff. Further, the cooperative institutes must be charged with and given the administrative freedom to ensure adequate scientific oversight, consistent with the requirement that all NOAA-sponsored research, regardless of who performs it, is subject to periodic peer review and that the work is consistent with the strategic or operational needs of NOAA Strategic Plan. Improved Relations With Universities We continue to believe that, in general, NOAA underutilizes its university partners in developing a more focused delivery system for the dissemination of information. Land-Grant schools and Sea Grant institutions have outreach systems that represent opportunities for NOAA to connect not only with local and regional non-government entities, but also with State and local governments. The co-location of facilities has been particularly advantageous to both the universities and the agency. Weather service offices located on campuses have direct access to ongoing meteorological research and teaching programs that ensures that operational forecasters maintain or improve their skills. Students can gain work experience, which leads to graduate studies in NOAA-related research programs, ensuring a pool of highly motivated students for employment in the environmental sciences. These types of arrangements should be expanded. In fact we would suggest that any campus that has an NWS office should also have a cooperative institute arrangement dealing with teaching, research, and outreach elements. In many cases, NOAA is not using to full advantage research conducted outside the agency, research that could significantly aid in accomplishing its many missions. Indeed, some researchers in the university community perceive a "not invented here" attitude in much of NOAA. Cumbersome bureaucratic management practices continue to impede the rapid transfer of new understanding and state-of-the-art technology to operational use. Much more research on behalf of NOAA could and should be conducted outside the agency, always subject to scrutiny and safeguards that ensures that such research is of the highest quality and improves NOAA's mission performance. We note that some universities have sought support for research of lower quality or questionable relevance to NOAA through Congressional earmarks in the NOAA budget. NASULGC strongly discourages its members from pursuing such earmarks and will continue to do so. NOAA should see many of these efforts as symptoms indicative of problems in the ways in which NOAA deals with universities in regard to research and development activities. We recommend that the Science Advisory Board ascertain how many arrangements NOAA has with universities, across the five line offices. We have made an initial attempt to determine the numbers and found them elusive. The problem is that, in our superficial review of these arrangements, it appears that the Line Offices have been engaging in these ventures in an ad hoc, piecemeal fashion with little oversight or accountability to the NOAA mission. We think it would useful for NOAA to have a detailed picture of these relationships. Once this is available, NOAA would be able to better assess how these arrangements help it attain its strategic objectives. We also continue to find it difficult for the university community to impact NOAA in any collective way. While NOAA communicates well with universities on an individual basis, there is substantial benefit for the Agency in hearing from a "community" of universities. Such an endeavor was once carried out by the Office of the Chief Scientist, and then OAR. Two major conferences were conducted between NOAA and universities with tangible results and benefits for both. Now, we have been told that the mechanism for university input is the SAB. We appreciate that it is not the purpose of, nor is it feasible for, the public input sessions of the SAB's regular meetings to serve as a venue for a comprehensive dialogue. We urge that the SAB's Issue Group on Education to explore options and then identify and implement an approach that would bring NOAA and the nation's research universities together at a forum where open exchange and dialogue can be executed. NOAA is encouraged to design a format that would allow universities to again engage in a dialogue directly with NOAA senior management and the SAB. We believe this would help NOAA identify areas where NOAA's current research may be wanting, better define the major emerging research themes, , and explore potential resources beneficial to the Agency that universities bring to the table. Competitive, peer-reviewed extramural research is fundamental to developing the technologies which ensure safe food and water supplies, a healthy environment, sufficient energy sources, better medical care, improved communications and transportation systems, a stronger national defense and strategies and tools to mitigate natural hazards. Information from such research leads to better management of natural resources and maintenance of conditions that contribute to a desired quality of life. Some of the advantages of university research include: the high degree of quality control, through peer review and other review processes; the state and private investment in university infrastructure; the contribution of university research to education of future scientists and engineers through the involvement of students in the research enterprise; the flexibility of the university investment, since funds can be reallocated to new needs and new talent once goals are met, rather than to subsidizing federal facilities and personnel dedicated to prior needs; the decentralized nature of universities which can lead to new directions in research long before the federal administrative structure recognized potential opportunities There continues to be a strong relationship between universities and OAR laboratories, which ensures that university research can be rapidly assimilated into NOAA operational activities. The success of this enterprise depends on a healthy level of support for both extramural research and for NOAA internal applied research. Grants Management One of the important ongoing issues between NOAA and the university community has been the extramural grants process. Streamlining the grants process and reducing paperwork have been concerns that were raised in both of the earlier BOA White Papers dealing with NOAA issues and have been extensively covered in the two NOAA/University Partnership Meetings in 1994 and 1996--as well as in the follow-up implementation meetings that were generated after those gatherings. We continue to receive reports that the situation has not really changed, or may have gotten worse. We are aware that recent grants have taken five months to process, or roughly 150 days. By contrast, 70% of the grants from ONR are processed in less than 30 days, and only 10% take more than two months. For NSF, 90% are processed in less than 60 days. At the same time, NOAA is requiring that all of its competitions be published in the Federal Register. This is a time-consuming process that uses up staff time, ensures delay, and almost always results in serious problems, since too much of the effort comes from the NOAA General Counsel's office rather than from the more knowledgeable program offices. Such cumbersome procedures have the effect of engendering frustration in NOAA's extramural research community and undermining the trust that NOAA leaders have painstakingly worked to cultivate. We would urge that the SAB review the grants process and make recommendations based on experience with other granting agencies. Research Budget An overarching issue for all research managers, federal and university, is to ensure that long-term research capabilities are not eroded by inflation and reallocations to administrative costs . We again note and express great concern that the budget proposed for the Office of Oceanic and Atmospheric Research continues to lag behind the requests for the other line offices. While the request for OAR is not as bleak this year as in past years and contains some important elements, it does little to make up for more than a decade of austere budgets that have not kept up with inflation and which have been severely eroded by reallocations. Similarly, we understand that the real growth in NOS has been in the regular management accounts, while scientific and technology development are being left behind. We believe the situation in the OAR Research Laboratories is particularly crucial and merits the immediate attention of NOAA senior management. These Labs own the research capital (in terms of equipment, facilities, and scientific intellect) that allows NOAA to undertake long-term programs (including implementation and fielding) that carry some risk. In addition, the Labs work closely with university researchers, often through Joint Institutes, drawing on and integrating results from shorter-term projects. Research in the Labs is distinct and complementary to that carried out via shorter term, peer-reviewed proposals in universities. Erosion of the Labs' base funding is thus erosion in the longer-term health of environmental research. The OAR Labs have not had an increase in base budgets in over 10 years and during that time the purchasing power of the Labs has decreased by over half. The request for FY 01 contains enhancements to base, but not enough to cover > pay costs and some of the base shortfall. The Labs, in many instances, work closely with our universities to perform some of the critical research we have described above. The erosion in the Labs' base budgets must be arrested if NOAA is to retain a sound research base and avoid further reductions in funding for > federal and university staff. We recommend that NOAA continually monitor and document the status of science in all line offices. This would likely underscore the need for a strong science and technology component in the strategic plan. NOAA needs to retain a strong, active, and separate research office. The mission Line Offices simply cannot devote the necessary resources to research when faced with daily mission needs, such as daily forecasts or fish regulation. Research, especially innovative (high risk) and long term research, invariably gets marginalized in the effort to meet today's immediate operational needs. Yet such research efforts are the key to NOAA's future. NOAA's improvement in managing its environmental stewardship and environmental prediction portfolios will hinge to a large extent on maintaining a vibrant research capability. NASULGC continues to believe that NOAA would be better served by an institutional arrangement that features three line offices: one for monitoring, analysis, and prediction of the marine and atmospheric environments; one for managing living marine resources and undertaking regulatory functions; and one for research and development. Minority Serving Initiative NASULGC strongly supports NOAA's Minority Serving Institutions Initiative. The 35 NASULGC historically Black institutions are served by the Association's Office for the Advancement of Public Black Colleges. OAPBC is an information and advocacy office of NASULGC in cooperation with the American Association of State Colleges and Universities. In addition, NASULGC members include a number of Hispanic-serving universities and 29 tribally controlled institutions. The underrepresentation of minorities in the earth science disciplines continues to plague this nation. The NOAA plan contains important elements that will expand and strengthen NOAA's partnership with MSI's and, we believe, constitutes a good faith effort. The plan's Cooperative Science Centers have the potential to make a valuable contribution to the development of science excellence in MSI's. However, the Centers could be enhanced with an explicit capacity-building component, perhaps along the lines of the $9 million Capacity Building Program at USDA. In addition, more centers or a more focused capacity building program will increase the potential for success. Capacity building addresses a fundamental need and is aimed at enabling MSI's to develop the infrastructure and institutional capability to successfully compete for Federal grants and private funding. We believe that the proposed Graduate Scientist Program will broaden the pipeline in the sciences and ultimately create a more diverse workforce in NOAA and the nation's scientific enterprise. Similarly, the proposed Student Fellowship Program will give minority students the institutional experience they need to complement their educational successes. We think the Environmental Entrepreneurship Program is dedicated ostensibly to supporting the Department of Commerce mission. We are not familiar with such a model, but are willing to keep an open mind. We suggest that, should others have a similar reaction, NOAA might wish to re-work this program element or dedicate additional resources to the Centers and capacity building. Major Research Initiatives We believe that NOAA needs to support several research initiatives for the Agency to successfully accomplish its environmental stewardship and environmental prediction missions. We have discussed some of these below. US Weather Research Program (USWRP) -- USWRP is in a critical start-up stage. This initiative offers NOAA a unique opportunity for quick return on modest research investments, as the USWRP will exploit the infrastructure put in place by the modernization of the National Weather Service. This applied research program will lead directly to new observational, analysis, and prediction tools for all forms of severe weather, ranging from hurricane landfall to severe thunderstorms to wintertime heavy snow and blizzard events. Preliminary experiments and careful planning of the USWRP by both NOAA and university researchers over the last three years almost certainly guarantee a rapid return on the investment. However, the NOAA investment has been embarrassingly low, with the direct result that this initiative remains in a continual "start-up phase". The USWRP is a major opportunity to take advantage of the capabilities of our universities and the NOAA labs to provide rapid operational improvements in forecasting and also to provide opportunities for the value-added private sector. While independent initiatives by individual NOAA Labs may address some small fraction of the research challenges identified in the planning for the USWRP, to obtain the full range of benefits that are within our grasp requires a major national effort involving all of NOAA, other federal agencies, and the universities. This is an area where NOAA as a whole should lead. Although NOAA has pledged to increase its contribution to $2 million for FY 2001, we feel NOAA should commit to at least $10 million Coastal Hazards - Parallel with the USWRP, coastal hazards should be a major undertaking for NOAA. Such a focused initiative is fully warranted by the risks resulting from the migration of a significant fraction of the population to coastal areas in the last three decades. A coastal hazards initiative would also make extensive use of university-based facilities and further exploit the observing systems deployed under the NWS modernization program. A coastal hazards initiative will benefit greatly from an integrated ocean observing system. Marine Biotechnology - Biotechnology research is important to understanding such crucial NOAA concerns as fisheries stock structure; aquaculture and stock restoration; the understanding and amelioration of shellfish diseases; and bio-remediation of contaminated sediments, both in ocean and estuarine waters and in shoreline areas. It can also provide the underpinning for future industrial development, including the development of biosensors, bio-processors, food products, and pharmaceuticals. Industry will ultimately be responsible for product development, but NOAA and its university partners can provide the knowledge base that is necessary for development to begin. Advances in marine biotechnology will enhance NOAA's broad marine resource management agenda and the interests of NOAA and the Department of Commerce in sustainable economic development. Marine Bio-diversity - The key to effective management of fisheries is understanding the ecosystems of which the fish are part. Yet we do yet not understand what is in the ecosystem, much less how its components are interrelated. We know very little about mid-level sea life and have only begun to gain insights into deep ocean and sub-seafloor life. The total biomass in both instances is enormous, and may well exceed the entire terrestrial biomass. NOAA is uniquely positioned to begin to understand what is there so that we can begin to responsibly assume stewardship for this vast domain. A better understanding of oceanic bio-diversity, as in the rainforest, will undoubtedly yield substantial economic benefits in the future. But bio-diversity is important in its own right, and it needs to be part of both the research and management agendas of NOAA. Aquaculture - Expansion of the U.S. marine aquaculture industry is constrained by its complex technology, diversity of species, multiple conflicts among production practices, environmental concerns, demand by coastal residents for high aesthetic quality in coastal regions, and fragmented institutional and regulatory systems. Given adequate government incentives and improved research, the U.S. aquaculture has the potential to supply up to 25 percent of all seafood consumed in the U.S. during the next 20 years. NOAA through Sea Grant and other activities, can supply the full range of services to advance marine aquaculture from the research to delivery (extension). We appreciate the opportunity to make this presentation and offer our continued assistance and good offices in helping NOAA fulfill its vital mission.