Allen Ocean Observing Bill Improves Fishing and Port Safety
Oceans
Bangor Daily News
Vicki Ekstrom
Boston University Washington News Service
4/2/2008
WASHINGTON – Legislation sponsored by Rep. Tom Allen, D-Maine, that would strengthen ocean observation techniques and improve understanding of the nation’s bodies of water passed in the House on Monday.
Under the bill air, land and sea observations, which have been carried out by many government agencies and private organizations with different techniques and goals, would be coordinated under one integrated system allowing the nation to make better use of the information.
“We watch weathermen on the news and we forget that behind those reports is this vast network of weather satellites and other apparatuses,” Allen said in an interview on Wednesday. “An integrated system provides that data. A similar kind of data flow is what the integrated observation system provides.”
Allen’s national integrated system for studying the oceans is based on Maine’s Gulf of Maine Ocean Observing System, or GoMOOS, which studies the Gulf of Maine to improve safety, increase understanding of weather and contribute to climate change findings.
GoMOOS was the model for regional observing systems throughout the country, but each year GoMOOS struggles to obtain funding, said Philip Bogden, head of GoMOOS.
“This bill will certainly help to sustain the data flow, but I think we still face significant challenges ahead,” said Bogden, who is exploring an alternative business model as well because, he said, GoMOOS can’t completely depend on the federal government.
In addition to establishing a funding mechanism for regional systems throughout the country, the bill “will provide a steady stream of real-time data about what’s happening offshore,” Allen said.
Allen recounts speaking with a Rockland, Maine, fisherman several years ago who told him how fishermen benefited from GoMOOS.
“Instead of trying to guess what the weather was going to be seven miles away, he could turn on his computer and get real-time data about what was going on out there and decide whether it was safe to go out and fish,” Allen said.
“I think it will have a major positive effect on the industry,” said Patrice McCarron, head of the Maine Lobstermen’s Association “The fishermen have become very dependent on the buoys to find out sea conditions and help tell them not to go out when it’s not safe…. This makes a system that was pioneered by Maine a national priority for the country.”
Allen also said the bill would help scientists who are “trying over an extended period of time to figure out what’s happening with the oceans.”
A coordinated observing system also would help to lessen erosion and pollution, strengthen the protection of ports and improve predictions of climate and weather changes and storms, like hurricanes.
The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration would be the lead agency to oversee and allot money to the new ocean-observing system.
The bill has been introduced in the House in the past, but “never went anywhere with the Republican Congress because even though it’s not a lot of money, it’s money,” Allen said. The initial investment for the integrated system was estimated at $138 million by the National Office for Integrated and Sustained Ocean Observations, or Ocean.US, the federal agency that would develop this effort.
The Senate’s companion measure was introduced by Sen. Olympia Snowe, R-Maine, and approved by the Senate Commerce, Science and Transportation Committee last summer. A full Senate vote has not been scheduled. When introduced in the past, the legislation has passed in the Senate, her office said.
“Despite the constant interaction between our lives on land and the natural systems of the ocean, the physical properties of nearly three-quarters of the Earth’s surface remain a mystery,” Snowe said after Monday’s passage of the House bill. “This bipartisan effort will help our country uncover those mysteries by developing a national integrated system.”
A nationwide observing system was one of the Bush administration’s top three recommendations when it announced its Ocean Research Priorities Plan and Implementation Strategy in January 2007.
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