Environmental Security Through Intelligence and Stewardship Rear Admiral Michael J. Silah Director, NOAA Corps and OMAO Heritage of the NOAA Commissioned Officer Corps Faced with tough national security and economic challenges and a natural world governed by powerful and mysterious forces that often threatened life, property and commerce, President Thomas Jefferson created a new federal agency in 1807 to support the nation’s defense, promote the well-being of its citizens and unlock nature’s secrets. The new agency’s mission was to chart the nation’s coastal waters to ensure that ships could move civilians, troops and materiel safely. Its very existence was recognition that our national security and economic vitality are closely and inseparably linked with our understanding of the environment. During the next 150 years, that agency, the Survey of the Coast (later the Coast & Geodetic Survey(C&GS)), would prove itself in war as well as in peacetime. With America’s entry into World War I, a commissioned service of the C&GS was formed in 1917 to ensure the rapid assimilation of C&GS technical skills for defense purposes. During World War II, officers and civilians of the C&GS produced nautical and aeronautical charts, provided critical geospatial information to artillery units and conducted reconnaissance surveys. Today, the work of the C&GS and more is conducted by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) and the NOAA Commissioned Officer Corps. The direct descendants of the C&GS, NOAA and the NOAA Corps work every day to keep the nation secure and productive by providing products and services that: support maritime domain awareness; help ensure safe passage of commercial and military traffic on our nation’s waterways; warn mariners, aviators and the public of severe weather; aid search and rescue efforts; and conserve and protect our natural resources. Specialized aircraft for a vital need NOAA’s Office of Marine and Aviation Operations operates, manages and maintains a fleet of nine highly specialized aircraft that provide a wide range of airborne capabilities. The agency’s two Lockheed WP-3D Orion turboprop “hurricane hunter” aircraft are equipped with an unprecedented variety of scientific instrumentation, radars and recording systems for both in situ and remote sensing measurements of the atmosphere, the earth and its environment. With NOAA’s Gulfstream IV-SP hurricane surveillance jet, these aircraft greatly improve our physical understanding of hurricanes and enhance the accuracy of tropical cyclone forecasts. To ensure that NOAA can continue to fulfill their vital environmental intelligence-gathering missions well into the future, one of NOAA’s WP-3D (N42RF) has undergone significant upgrades to extend the service life of the aircraft another 15 to 20 years. This WP-3D has been refitted with newly refurbished wings, more fuel-efficient engines, and state-of-the-art avionics and has also returned to the skies with a new paint scheme. NOAA’s other WP-3D (N43RF) is currently at the U.S. Navy’s Fleet Readiness Center Southeast in Jacksonville, Florida undergoing the same upgrades. NOAA’s light aircraft also play a vital role in monitoring our environment. The agency’s King Air, Turbo Commander, and Twin Otter aircraft support marine mammal population studies, shoreline change assessments, oil spill investigations and snowpack surveys for spring flood forecasts. Operated, managed and maintained by a team of highly trained NOAA Corps officers and civilians, NOAA aircraft operate in some of the world’s most remote and demanding environments over open ocean, mountains, coastal wetlands and Arctic pack ice, and in and around hurricanes and other severe weather with an exemplary safety record. There are no comparable aircraft in the commercial fleet to support NOAA’s atmospheric and hurricane surveillance and research programs. Recapitalizing the NOAA ship fleet Seagoing vessels have been, and will continue to be, a primary source of observation data, providing measurements of physical and biological oceanography and supporting NOAA’s information and ecosystem management services. NOAA currently operates, manages and maintains a fleet of 16 research and survey ships, comprising the largest fleet of federal research ships in the country. Ranging from large oceanographic research vessels capable of exploring the world’s oceans to smaller ships responsible for charting shallow U.S. bays and inlets, the fleet supports a wide range of activities, including fisheries research, nautical charting, and ocean and climate studies. Every year, NOAA’s ships conduct more than 100 missions for collection of data critical for nautical charts, fishery quotas, exploration of America’s 4.3-million-square-mile exclusive economic zone, storm surge modeling and weather forecasting. NOAA, other U.S. government agencies, communities and businesses around the nation rely on this data to keep U.S. ports open to maritime commerce, understand changes to the planet, monitor the health of fish stocks and plan for severe storm events. While other federal and academic agencies perform marine research and collect at-sea data, NOAA is unique in its roles of collecting data that directly feeds products and services vital to the economy and health of the nation, as well as researching new technology and methodology to improve the reliability and accuracy of the products and services. NOAA is unique in the capabilities of its fleet and expertise of its maritime workforce of NOAA Corps officers and civilian wage mariners trained specifically for these missions. The demand for NOAA’s environmental data continues to grow as more people live and work near or on the coasts and thus are affected by ocean-driven weather patterns. More than 1.2 million people move to the coast each year, with 39 percent of our nation’s people now residing in coastal communities. In 2014 alone, $1.75 trillion worth of U.S. goods moved through our ports, representing more than 71 percent of U.S. imports and exports by weight. In 2016, NOAA released The NOAA Fleet Plan: Building NOAA’s 21st-Century Fleet, which identifies an integrated approach consisting of best management practices and long-term recapitalization levers to extend and sustain our capabilities. This plan includes the critical long-term strategy of designing and constructing up to eight new ships specifically designed to meet NOAA core capability requirements. In 2017 NOAA’s Office of Marine and Aviation Operations took an even larger step to meet this demand. The purchase of the NOAA AGOR (Auxiliary General Oceanographic Research) Variant, NOAA’s next ocean class vessel, was facilitated. This vessel will be designed in collaboration with the U.S. Navy and will feature a range up to 10,000 nm and a dynamic positioning system among other capabilities and cutting edge technology. This vessel will conduct missions such as: oceanographic modeling, marine geology, bathymetry, ocean engineering, marine acoustics as well as others. Partnering for success We continued in 2017 to enhance and expand our partnerships, including with the nation’s other uniformed services. We strengthened our relationship with the U.S Navy by collaborating to design and purchase our newest NOAA ship as well as completing ‘nose-to-tail” upgrades on the WP-3D hurricane hunter at the U.S. Navy’s Fleet Readiness Center Southeast in Jacksonville, Florida. Among our oldest and most steadfast partners is the U.S. Coast Guard. For more than 200 years, our two agencies have worked in partnership to promote, conduct and sustain maritime resilience, environmental sustainability and scientific research, from the Gulf of Mexico to the Arctic. We continue to build on our partnership with the Coast Guard to leverage our respective capabilities and assets where we have common interests, including the servicing of NOAA ships at the Coast Guard Yard at Curtis Bay in Maryland and the exchange of officers. The NOAA Corps and the Coast Guard continue to jointly train newly commissioned NOAA Corps officers and Coast Guard officer candidates at the Coast Guard Academy in New London, Connecticut. OMAO has also continued to partner with industry, academia and other federal agencies. These partnerships have promoted cross-training while cultivating new technologies and alternative strategies for data collection and observation. Mission-ready The Atlantic hurricane season of 2017 will definitely be one to remember. The 10 hurricanes that made landfall left physical and financial effects that will last for years. NOAA ships, aircraft and personnel worked tirelessly last season to mitigate the impacts of the 17 named storms. In mid-August NOAA hurricane hunters were deployed to fly missions into Hurricane Harvey. What they didn’t foresee was a barrage of storms that would lead to 51 straight days of hurricane reconnaissance flights. NOAA's preliminary data show that through the use of the data that was acquired aboard NOAA aircraft the National Hurricane Center issued forecasts with record-setting accuracy. Additionally, storm track forecasts for the three most damaging hurricanes were about 25 percent more accurate than average. NOAA aircraft played a pivotal role in gathering information about these powerful storms, however, NOAA ships pitched in as well. NOAA Ship Thomas Jefferson’s response in the wake of Hurricane Maria was essential in re-opening 18 critical port facilities in Puerto Rico and the U.S. Virgin Islands by conducting underwater and shoreline surveys to identify navigation hazards, as well as repairs to tide and weather observation stations. While today’s challenges differ in many ways from those Thomas Jefferson confronted, the foundations of a strong defense, a highly trained and adaptable uniformed force, robust infrastructure and domain awareness, remain the same. As we navigate in this dynamic, 21st-century world, we continue to build a NOAA Corps that continually senses change and continually adapts. We are also building leaders to meet the challenges of the next 100 years Rear Admiral Michael J.