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NOAA Research: Where Service Begins

Video with Assistant Administrator Dr. Richard Spinrad
June 2007

DR. RICK SPINRAD:  I thought what I would do is start with a couple of questions and, just with a show of hands, I'd like to know how many of you have checked the weather in the last day or so?  Okay. Keep your hands up. Most of you.  How many of you have flown in an airplane in the last year. Just add another hand. All right.

Now, the real kicker. How many of you have bought anything in the last year. Right. You got two hands and a foot.

My point here is that every one of those actions is a consequence. Your ability to do those things is a direct consequence of the research that we have been conducting in NOAA for the last many decades. Weather forecasts are continually getting better year after year after year. In your lifetimes, we can comfortably say that the forecasts have gone to the point where the 72-hour forecast is as good as the 48-hour forecast was years ago. And, you can do those kinds of calibrations across the board.

The point about flying aircraft. Every airplane, every commercial airplane gets weather forecasts, gets basically forecasts for what the weather will be. Do they have to rise up to 35- or 40,000 feet?  Can they divert and avoid thunderstorms?  That sort of thing.

The interesting one most people don't realize is that 95 percents of our goods and services coming from overseas come by ship. And, if you look, have had a chance to look at what we do in NOAA, you will realize that we spend a lot of time in developing models and observation capabilities to improve the way in which products come into and go out of our ports.

Everything we do in NOAA research feeds directly into your daily activities. And, I could spend the rest of this afternoon talking about things like health, talking about things like agriculture, talking about things like energy security. All of these things tie into the kind of research I'm gonna talk about here.

If we can't convince any audience, whether it's a group of students like you, whether it's a staffer on the hill, or a member of Congress, whether it's the guy on the barstool in Topeka, that what we are doing is relevant, then we're not doing our jobs.

Now, I like to view our vision and mission statement as a three-legged stool. And, it's interesting because in years past, it was hard to make this argument. The argument that you could conduct the search that was equally beneficial for environment stewardship and economic development, as well as obviously protecting life and property.

But, now, what you're starting to see, if you read the papers, is that major corporations, for example, whose primary interest is economic development, are fundamentally concerned with issues like carbon emissions, climate change, global warming, so that balance of environmental stewardship, economic development, protecting life and property is really what our mission is about.

And, this actually captures it. The images here capture it. Now, I like this because we've got a couple of examples. Let me see if -- do I have a pointer here?  This young fellow over here is the same as that old fellow in the back there. Captain Craig McLean, diving in Alvin. Craig is a retired NOAA Corps officer. He is now one of our deputies working on programs and administration.

This is retired Navy Commander Karen Kohanowich, who is a Deputy Director of our National Undersea Research Program.

This is Susan Solomon, a preeminent researcher at our laboratory in Boulder. Earth System Research Lab. Susan is the recipient of the Presidential Medal of Science and is recognized as the woman who effectively discovered and identified the ozone hole. NOAA employee.

And then, down in the lower right, it's hard to point him out but that Dr. Eddie Bernard who is the Director of our Pacific Marine Environmental Lab. And, they putting out a version of a DART buoy. That laboratory, and Eddie Bernard specifically, are the folks responsible for inventing the concept and the technology for detecting tsunamis in the open ocean. Where the wave itself my only be a few centimeters in wave height but may be a mile in wave length. So, how do you detect that?  Extraordinary capability.

And, I will tell you right now that, because of what they have done in PMEL, we have already saved tens of thousands of live. We're obviously mobilized to put these all around the world after the December 26, 2004 tsunami. And, we will save hundreds of thousands of lives as a direct result of this.

See, one of the products of our Great Lakes Environmental Research Lab, which has developed a Great Lakes forecast system for water level for any number of factors associated with currents, winds, the kinds of things that the shippers, the commercial shippers, as well as the recreational, the tourists and recreational boaters and fisherman care about.

Below right you see the tsunami buoy. Now, the interesting thing, what I like about this story is that our lab in Seattle invented the DART buoy. The DART buoy that you see here is roughly ten feet across. They looked at that and they said, "Well, this is great if you've got a 300-foot ship dedicated with cranes and winches to put out there. What can we do so that when the Indonesians, for example, say that they want to put several of these out but they don't have a vessel like that?" 

So, what they've done at PMEL now is they have developed a similar kind of buoy you can put in the back of a three-quarter ton pickup truck. Really some extraordinary technology. Science as well.

Let's talk a little bit about the climate arena. Hopefully, you've all heard of ENSO. If you haven't heard of ENSO, you've heard of El Niño. El Niño Southern Oscillation is what ENSO stands for.

We now know about El Niño and La Niña and the southern oscillation because we had years of observational capabilities as demonstrated by the buoys shown in the upper left. This is an array of -- there dozens of these in an array in the equatorial Pacific that basically provide us the capability for observing the onset of El Niño and La Niña, which allows us now to forecast when we will see the consequences of El Niño, six months ahead of time.

We have a lot of research going on in the Arctic. And, some of the Antarctic as well. You gotta have observing capabilities not just in lovely places like Mauna Loa. But, you also need it up here in places like Barrow and in the South Pole as well.

Many of you have probably heard the news over the last three or four months that the intergovernmental panel on climate change has reported out on the clear and irrefutable evidence of anthropogenic influence on global climate change, global warming, CO₂ concentrations. And, in fact, you may have seen Susan Solomon, who had the lead for working group one on the news repeatedly back in February.

The other important point is that as that panel developed its conclusions about causes, effects, mitigation for climate change, they relied heavily on climate models. The kinds of computer intensive forecast systems that tell us what will happen with the doubling of CO₂ in terms of sea surface temperature, lower atmospheric temperature, even some prognoses on things like ocean acidification.

And, I'm here to tell you that of the roughly 20 models that have been used globally, number one and number three in terms of performance came out of our Geophysical Fluid Dynamics Lab in Princeton, New Jersey.

I'll just say a little bit about weather. This one's pretty exciting because the challenge is clear. Save lives and property from improved weather forecast. And, for NOAA, what it means is that our domain of responsibilities is expanding.

So, for example, whereas in the past it's been a relatively traditional give me the 12, 24, 48, 72-hour forecasts to temperature, winds, pressure, that sort of thing, we're now being asked to provide forecasts for fire weather, for example. Under the following conditions:  If there's a drought, given a certain amount of soil moisture, given a certain amount of fuel content. That is, how dense are the forests?  What can we expect in terms of conditions to effect forecasts of fire, brush fire and otherwise.

What are we gonna do in the future?  This is really where the exciting part comes down, especially in talking to a group like this. There are some phenomenal, new capabilities out there. You're just seeing a smattering of them here.

And, you'll have a chance, when you ask some questions, especially with Sandy MacDonald coming up. Sandy's been a leader in our concepts for using unmanned aerial systems. Or, as some people prefer, unpiloted aerial systems, right? 

How can we use these to get observations in hurricanes where we don't necessarily want to fly and put in harm's way major assets and people.

How can you get low-level winds near a hurricane with something like this?  Can you use these to overfly the Arctic to get observations of carbon dioxide?  What about surveillance of some of our marine sanctuaries that are far offshore? 

In the upper right, you see a picture of a unique vessel. And, you'll hear some more about this. This is a vessel called the Okeanos Explorer. It was the U.S. Naval Ship Capable. We received it two years ago. It's in the yard in Seattle being refitted to be a dedicated ocean exploration vessel.

And, I'm not gonna steal all of Fred Gorell's fire. But, I will tell you that, with this capability, working with folks like Bob Ballard, we will be in a position where you can sit in the room across the hall or in New Hampshire or Seattle or -- which one am I missing, Craig?  There's one more, right?  One more of the Centers for --.

FRED GORELL:  We're out of Mystic, Connecticut.

DR. RICK SPINRAD:  Mystic, Connecticut. Thank you, Fred. You'll be able to basically serve as a chief scientist to that cruise and define what you want to look at, how you want to look at it. And, Fred'll give you a sense of what that means when he talks.

The lower two pictures are really cool. On the lower right, you see a naval vessel. And, there is a certain class of naval vessels called the Aegis cruisers, Aegis destroyers.

Aegis is a radar system invented with support from the Navy to basically track multiple incoming bad guys. It has no moving parts. It's called a phased array radar because it sits there and electronically scans. And, if you've got these looking in four directions, you can get the same thing as you would get with a slow rotating radar. But, you get it faster. You get it more accurate. And, if you see something interesting over there, you can target it and follow it. Hmm.

About ten years ago, folks at our National Severe Storms Lab -- anybody see the movie "Twister?"  The technical advice for "Twister" came from our National Severe Storms Lab. So, everything they got right, they've got right because they talked to NOAA researchers in Norman, Oklahoma.

The folks in Norman said, "Well, what if you took that Aegis radar and used it for tracking tornadoes?"  And, right now, we are convinced that we can demonstrate how to use an Aegis radar, which we call a multipurpose phased array radar to track tornadoes, among other things, and improve the warning time.

Specifically, we believe that you can increase the average warning time for a tornado easily from 11 minutes to 14 minutes. Now, if you're in the track of the tornado, I guarantee you those extra three minutes means live saved, property protected.

So, here's a wonderful example of the creativity of an organization like NOAA taking advantage of some existing technology, applying new concepts to it and saying, "Hey, we can use that for economic development, environmental stewardship, and protection of life and property."