Admiral advocates
sea sensor expansion

The climate prediction network
could also detect terrorist attacks

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By Rita Beamish
Associated Press

A high-tech system of buoys, satellites and ocean sensors designed to make climate observations and forecasts can be adapted as well to serve as tools in the war on terror, says the administrator of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.

The ocean observing system, which so far is only implemented at a modest level in the equatorial Pacific, could be configured to detect underwater sound and, with the right bandwidth and sensors, such threats as biochemical releases, parasites and the like, said Vice Adm. Conrad Lautenbacher.

Lautenbacher spoke earlier this week at a meeting in Waikiki of the U.S. Commission on Ocean Policy and talked to reporters about the ocean observing system afterward. He said he has met with officials in President Bush's Office of Homeland Security about potential applications for the elaborate system.

Lautenbacher said the system he is advocating will cost hundreds of millions of dollars beyond what is now spent on a limited network of 72 moored buoys in the Pacific that measure surface meteorology and ocean temperatures.

That system, called the TAO/Triton Array, enabled NOAA to predict the 1997-98 El Nino weather condition six months in advance, giving coastal communities time to get ready.

Lautenbacher is also pushing for increased U.S. participation in Argo, an international effort to deploy 3,000 temperature floats that monitor surface data on the ocean and also dive to depths of a mile, collect data on currents, temperature, pressure, salinity and the like, and surface to transmit the data to satellites.

The Bush administration is seeking to increase the U.S. share of the Argo floats from one-third to one-half globally.