Page 45: of Marine Technology Magazine (March 2015)

So now we have resilient communities, evolving the weath- technology in gliders, unmanned aerial systems, unmanned er service, and … underwater systems. We’re going to see crowd-sourcing. The next one is improving our observations, which We’re going to see ships of opportunity, ships where we can is more than just satellites. We talk about modernizing all of place instruments for data collection. While the importance our operations. This includes partnerships and collabora- of unmanned systems will increase, ultimately I still think it’s tions with other agencies, with other industries, with other critical to have people at sea; we can’t just go to satellites, we academic and research institutions. So we want to increase can’t just go to unmanned observations. our observational capacity – it includes satellites, it includes ships, it includes buoys, gliders, land and ocean observation So it sounds like NOAA is actively engaged in building systems. That’s a big part of how we derive our models and partnerships among industry and academia. How do you our data that we provide the public, so that’s a very important see this relationship evolving for the greater good of all?

foundation for us. The fourth priority is organizational excel- So let’s look at our weather enterprise. The weather lence. All this depends on our people and people are the most enterprise itself encompasses private sector research institu- important asset that we have at NOAA. tions, academic institutions, government, NGO, so you have a breadth of participation. And within that billion dollar enter-

Let’s talk about your observation capabilities and ships, prise, you have the providers who provide the infrastructure ships which are big, expensive, and expensive to deploy. – sensors, observations, data collection. And then you have

How do you see your observational techniques evolving in the intermediaries who take that information and produce the coming 10 to 20 years? products. If you look at the weather enterprise, early on the In the past, when science wasn’t as integrated as it providers were busy, because everybody was trying to develop is today, we had speci