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Office of Oceanic and Atmospheric Research
1315 East-West Highway
Silver Spring, MD 20910
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NOAA Strategic Goal: Climate Variability and Change

NOAA is installing the U.S. Climate Reference Network across the country, to measure weather and climate. About 110 stations are envisioned for the network and more than 80 stations are presently operating in 40 states, including Rhode Island. The network is intended to operate for many decades, providing highly accurate and well-documented measurements of key variables such as air temperature and precipitation. Data is used operationally to put climate anomalies into historical perspective and to detect climate change. The effort is supported by the NOAA Research Climate Observation and Services Program and the Air Resources Laboratory, which designed the stations and has been assembling, calibrating, deploying, and maintaining the network sites in collaboration with NOAA’s National Environmental Satellite and Data Information Service. A list of the operational sites and links to their data are available at this URL: http://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/crn/hourly.

NOAA Strategic Goal: Weather and Air Quality

The United States Weather Research Program (USWRP) brings together Federal agencies with the academic and private sectors to move research ideas and technologies into operational weather forecasts. As part of the Joint Hurricane Testbed project, the USWRP provides grant funding to the Science Applications International Corporation (Mclean, Virginia), the Naval Research Laboratory (Monterey, California), University of Rhode Island (Kingston, Rhode Island), University of Miami (Miami, Florida), the National Center for Atmospheric Research (Boulder, Colorado), Colorado State University (Boulder, Colorado), and the University of Western Ontario (Canada). The Joint Hurricane Testbed Project is working to upgrade the hurricane numerical model prediction system and improve hurricane analysis and prediction.

NOAA Strategic Goal: Ecosystems

NOAA’s National Sea Grant College Program is a federal-university partnership that integrates research, education, and outreach (extension and communications). Sea Grant forms a network of 32 programs in all U.S. coastal and Great Lakes states, Puerto Rico and Guam. Rhode Island Sea Grant is based at the University of Rhode Island's Graduate School of Oceanography. Priority research areas include commercial and recreational fisheries, seafood safety, marine aquaculture, habitat restoration, estuarine ecology and water quality, watershed assessment management, sustainable coastal community development, and natural hazard mitigation planning and response. Current research projects include: identification and analysis of multiple populations of longfin squid; riparian sinks for mitigating septic system contamination in urbanizing coastal watersheds; temperature-nutrient interactions in coastal lagoons; hydrogeological characterization and groundwater flow patterns; diminishing water quality in Rhode Island coastal waters; elucidating the ecology of brackish and tidal freshwater marshes for their conservation and management; BayMap: A proposal to image the seafloor, map and groundtruth the habitats, and document the cultural landscape of Narragansett Bay and Rhode Island and Connecticut coastal environments; and, multispecies assessment models for fisheries management. In addition to research, Rhode Island Sea Grant maintains active education, and outreach programming in both of Rhode Island’s Congressional Districts. For more information see http://seagrant.gso.uri.edu.

NOAA's Undersea Research Program (NURP) is a unique national service that provides undersea scientists with tools and expertise that they need to work in the undersea environment, from the shoreline to the deep sea. Each year, the program supports 200 or more undersea research projects related to NOAA's mission as steward of oceanic resources and environments, including research to support NOAA's management responsibilities in fisheries (stock assessment validation, understanding essential fish habitat), corals, and other coastal resources. NURP is comprised of a network of six regional centers and a national technology institute. NOAA's Undersea Research Center for the North Atlantic and Great Lakes (NAGL), one of the six NURP regional centers, is housed at the University of Connecticut. The NALG Center supports undersea research off the U.S.’s northeastern coast (i.e., Gulf of Maine, Georges Bank and the Southern New England Coast including Long Island Sound) and in the Laurentian Great Lakes. The center’s research focuses on ecosystem response to human induced stress such as fishing and pollution and the role of habitat in sustaining fisheries and biological diversity. Underwater diving technologies available through NAGL include occupied submersibles, remotely operated vehicles (ROV's), and Nitrox scuba. For more information see http://www.nurp.noaa.gov/natlan.html.

NOAA’s Office of Ocean Exploration (OE), headquartered in Silver Spring, Maryland, supports activities that search and investigate the oceans for the purpose of discovery. OE missions fit into four areas: (1) mapping the physical, biological, chemical and archeological aspects of the ocean; (2) understanding ocean dynamics at new levels to describe the complex interactions of the living ocean; (3) developing new sensors and systems for ocean exploration, and; (4) reaching out to the public to communicate the benefits to current of future generations of unlocking the secrets of the ocean. In 2005-2006, OE is providing funding to the Rhode Island Marine Archaeology Project and the University of Rhode Island to explore shipwrecks off the east coast of the U.S.

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Updated June 8, 2006