John
has
been a NOAA employee since 1976. John grew up in rural Connecticut
and developed strong interests in fishing, boating and scuba
diving. He attended the State University of New York Maritime
College in the Bronx, New York, graduating with a B.S. in
Meteorology and Oceanography, and earning a Coast Guard issued
Third Mates License.
The NOAA
Commissioned Officer Corps was a very attractive career for
him, offering opportunity for adventure and work directly
related to his interests. He was commissioned as an ensign
in the NOAA Corps in 1976 during his college graduation ceremony.
Recently
retired from the NOAA Corps, he is continuing his NOAA career,
working for the National Marine Fisheries Service (NMFS).
John's career with NOAA has led him around the country and
indeed to the ends of the earth, as well. Every NOAA Corps
Officer has a unique career path, and John's was certainly
an exciting one. But his experiences are not unusual given
the breadth of opportunities the NOAA Corps has to offer.
His shore-based
assignments included a three-year tour with the Geophysical
Monitoring for Climatic Change Program (now the Climate Diagnostics
Lab) in Boulder, Colorado. As part of that tour he spent a
year as the NOAA Observatory Station Chief at the South Pole
in Antarctica in 1979. At the South Pole he experienced six
months of darkness, temperatures to minus 106 Fahrenheit and,
for eight months of his one year stay, total isolation from
the outside world, other than by radio.
Another
year was spent as a climatological observer at the Moana Loa
Laboratory in Hilo, Hawaii. In Hawaii, he worked at the 10,000
ft level on the side of the Moana Loa volcano. Both of these
tours involved the monitoring of long-term trends in atmospheric
aerosols, carbon dioxide, halocarbons (Freon, etc), ozone
and other atmospheric constituents. His work was just part
of a long succession of NOAA's research and monitoring of
such parameters as ozone and CO2, long before terms like "hole
in the ozone layer" and "global warming" became
household expressions.
He was
assigned as a fisheries oceanographer, working in the NMFS
Woods Hole Laboratory and sailing on oceanographic research
cruises aboard the DELAWARE II and ALBATROSS IV. He was also
the NOAA Port Captain of Woods Hole, Massachusetts for three
years and NOAA Port Captain of San Diego for two more years.
Duties of these assignments included all aspects of shoreside
support for NOAA research vessels including scheduling cruises,
writing cruise instructions, hiring of personnel, ordering
of food, fuel, supplies, contracting for ship maintenance
and repair, handing payroll, and acting as the liaison between
the vessels and the NMFS laboratories.
Interspersed
among these shore-based assignments, he accumulated seven
years of sea duty including tours as fourth officer aboard
the GEORGE B. KELEZ (now decommissioned), studying the New
York Bight ecosystem, and Operations Officer aboard the ALBATROSS
IV conducting fishery stock assessment and research cruises
from the Gulf of Maine to Cape Hatteras, North Carolina.
John was
also the captain of the MURRE II (until it was decommissioned)
and then commanded the JOHN N. COBB, conducting fisheries
research in Southeast Alaska. Sailing as an observer aboard
a Norwegian fisheries research vessel, he also reached just
570 miles short of the North Pole. One of John's last assignments
with the Corps was in Maryland at the NOAA Corps headquarters
assisting in establishing vessel requirements for the design
of new NOAA fisheries research vessels. His final assignment
in the strategic planning division of NMFS led to an opportunity
for civilian employment and a chance to settle down in Maryland.
He now lives in Maryland with his wife and two children and
still enjoys archery, hunting, fishing, photography and bicycling.
